Colin Sprake (MYMSuccess) explains marketing for small business owners, arguing that practical sales activities and direct selling matter far more early-stage than expensive branding. He warns against over-investing in logos, websites and other brand “toys,” advises prioritizing sales skills and low-cost identity (e.g., simple logo or using your own name), and distinguishes graphic design from marketing strategy.
So what is marketing? Let's look at marketing. I'll come back to sales a little bit later. So what is marketing? What do you, when I say marketing to you, what does that, what does that mean to you? Communicating. Business awareness. Communicating. Okay, Business awareness. Business awareness. Educating. Absolutely fabulous. Educating. Exposing your business. Hence our first course name called Exposure Warrior. What else? What is marketing? Advertising. Advertising, which all falls under pretty much branding. I'll come back to that as a entity. Here's the sad part about branding. How many of you are small business owners? You have solopreneurs or you might have one or two staff working for you. Okay? Remember, small business now is defined as $50 million or less. So all of us are small business owners. Okay? Not for long though, okay? Because it's only what you buy into is how big you can be. You can be as big as you want. So branding for me is the one thing that most of us get stuck on. When we first start out, we go out and we say we have to have a logo, business cards, brochure, website, all the fancies spend a fortune. What do we really need? Sales. Which is what? A great attitude, a nice way to look and show up. Every time you say you're meant to show up and do great follow up. That's what you need more than you need toys. The sad part is, any graphic designers in the room, Any graphic designers, I'd be too scared with their hand up now. But here's the thing. Imagine a graphic designer. The best graphic designers in the world are the ones that give you process. You know, get your logo done. Once you've got your logo done, get a business card. Once you've got your business card, go out and make a ton of sales, then come back and get a website going. I ran this entire marketing company, a marketing company for one and a half years without a website. How do you do it? I sell myself. My website doesn't sell me, it's now selling me. Of course. But the key thing is a website is not your best sales tool unless it's doing sales online. Very few speakers sell courses online, very few. It's how they show up. So if you're selling online, that's maybe a little bit of a different story. But if you're doing a lot of interaction, you don't need all the tools. I watch business owners go out and get told they need 5, $6,000 worth of website, all the fancies, but really they don't need that stuff. They just need to take it. Five or six grand can get some business cards which really look great and go out and make some sales. That's the most important thing. How many of you realize you've spent way too much on tools that you really didn't need? I can tell you, there's so many people that spend money on tools. Branding is for the big boys, as I call it. Branding's for Coca Cola, branding's for Nike. Nike started off on a really small budget, branding wise. In the beginning they spent 250 million creating the Swoosh and doing all that marketing wise. People then remember their initial marketing strategies, which was go out and sell a ton of product and then they changed their whole branding strategy as they got bigger. It's really important to understand, do not get caught in the whole world of branding. You'll spend a fortune. Make little. I'd rather you make a ton. And when you get to a certain level, then get in to branding yourself. Yeah, create a logo in the beginning. But don't spend 1500 bucks on a fancy logo. Spend 400 bucks or 200 bucks or create it yourself. Make it be your name for a while. Remember you're selling who you are. Really, really important. So branding, you can hear. I'm passionate about it. A friend of mine out of Alberta, Greg Habstrut is amazing. And Greg's the same thing. He speaks in front of small business owners all the time. He goes, what are you doing branding yourselves? Well, my graphic designer told me, I need to remember, what are they called? Graphic designers. They're not called branding strategists or marketing people or marketers. They are graphic designers. Remember that. Nothing bad about graphic designers. It's just a matter. They need to know where their place is in the world. Most of them think they're marketers. If they've been trained, good for them. If they haven't been trained as marketers, they should stick to graphic design. Really, really mean that.
