Small Business Marketing Plan — Breaking Rules page 3

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A Simple Twist to the Small Business Marketing Plan

Jeff Bezos with his Amazon.com is among a large group of business owners and executives, each following a small business marketing plan that defies conventional rules for business success – and becoming wildly successful as a result.

Where traditional marketing programs consider these businesses exceptions and do not build rules around them, the new marketing sees these businesses as definers of the real-rules for success in business.

Simplify the Complex and Success Can Also Be Yours

How about Carbonite, the online computer backup service?

Here’s another example of an incredibly lucrative small business marketing solution in plain sight for everyone to see, if they only opened their eyes.

What a simple marketing plan. Click onto a website link and your free trial begins, where every file on your computer (except massive media files) is magically backed up. Now, if your computer ever crashes or gets stolen, or if some critical document gets corrupted or is accidentally deleted, the files can be retrieved.

At a major small business marketing conference, I heard several web storage people explain that it would be ridiculous for someone to offer storage to every consumer for a flat fee under $100.

Yet, that’s exactly what Carbonite did.

And the result of this counter-intuitive marketing plan? At its high point Carbonite generated a million new subscribers a month, each paying $55 per year.

That’s…

…$55 million of recurring revenues from such a simple idea that literally hundreds of companies with the same capabilities never thought of it.

Today Carbonite is spending like crazy on every type of advertising imaginable to expand its lead before competitors wake up to the incredible opportunity they have missed.

A Simple Twist to the Small Business Marketing Plan

Each of these successes started as tiny companies that figured out a simple twist to their marketing plan. Then suddenly, everything changed.

  • But you say you’re just an accountant. So was H&R Block.
  • Maybe you’re a lawyer or a paralegal? So was LegalZoom.com.
  • Do you make cookies, out of your home? How about Wally Amos of Famous Amos!

What kind of business are you in? What does your small business marketing plan look like?

Mary Hudson’s husband died, so she sold his gas station and moved herself and her kids back to live with her parents.

A few months into living with her parents, she started itching to get on her own two feet.

The only thing she knew was how to run a gas station. So she leased a nearby abandoned gas station and got the neighbor’s two kids to pump gas.

A few decades later her Hudson Oil chain had 300 gas stations and massive personal wealth. She even owned her own oil refinery.

Her explanation of how she became so successful was simple:

“Whether you own three or three hundred gas stations, the problems are basically the same. So I figured, why not own three-hundred.”

Why could this widow living at home with her kids create such a huge empire and you could not?

Perhaps it’s about luck? Sure.

Perhaps it’s about ambition? Sure.

But also, perhaps it’s because so many people do not realize how much opportunity is just a twist away from what you are currently doing.

Let’s Create a Small Business Marketing Plan that Works for You

The truth is, creating an effective Small Business Marketing Plan designed specifically for your size and type of business is not that complicated, once you eliminate the theoretical nonsense that looks good on paper but isn’t really relevant.

Maybe it’s because I have mild ADD, or maybe it’s because I’m really impatient. But for me, I want to get to the meat as quickly as possible and avoid all the irrelevant garbage.

If that’s what you want, then this website is for you.

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See: Sales and Marketing Plans – What They Are and How They Work