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When it comes to small business development marketing has a major role.

The biggest marketing error made in the world is caused by a lack of a simple fact …

People like to purchase from people they like .

That means people want to buy from a person, not a company. Ponder this yourself. You remember a business when you liked the business owner there and want to You don’t care about the name of the company, what’s that got to do with a benefit to you?

Let’s face it. We’re all selfish. We think about ourselves 10,000 times more than anyone else , let alone a company. So what we decide on are emotional benefits… to ourselves.

With that ‘filter’ in place, we look at how we want to spend our money.

We want to trust the business we buy from, but as companies don’t have a personality, we look at the person who represents the company in the advertisements.

If a business is brave enough to have the owner or CEO with their marketing, and reveal their name, then we decide whether that person is relatable to us. If they are, we think, ‘that company might be worth buying from… I like that person’. ‘And as I relate to that person, the company must be okay too’.

There are two fantastic examples of this to demonstrate the point. There is a large retailer in Australia that advertise their company name and brand themselves as a big retailer of electrical appliances. They say this promote this with their advertising. But they don’t give you a person you can relate to in their ads, just products with voice overs.

Another major retailer entered the market place over 20 years ago and a man told his story of how he got started and then over the years he kept doing the ads with himself in them. Even though it was a chain store he personalised the company because he was the person you related to in the ads and bought from him or his stores.

This second company today totally monopolises their segment of the retail industry and left the big retailer of products (who had been there 60+ years prior) miles behind .

A few years ago this same company decided to branch out with a new chain of shops that competed with its existing chain, but there was no CEO promoting the new chain , in fact there was no person at all in the ads that you could relate to, only products. That’s when I realised the CEO didn’t understand why his first major chain was so successful in the market place. 

Then I saw another example with an insurance company. One company had the country sewn up but then another insurance company came along and ‘personalised’ their company by using a pretty lady to represent their company on all their advertising. 

Then they put a catchy jingle on the end of the ad with the pretty lady smiling with the jingle and bingo, they took over the market share in very quick order. The existing major company lost significant a big market share because there was no personalisation.

If this principle of personalising a company business works for billion dollar companies it will work for you with your small business development.

How are you representing your company with all your marketing to consumers?

Are you giving them a person in your marketing they can relate to, or do you expect people to just like your company on its own?

Consumers don’t trust companies, they trust the people they see and talk to that represent the company.

So how can you use this principle? Simple.

Always use a photo of a person in your marketing, preferable yourself the business owner. It makes a massive impact on sales based proven results over more than 15 years of advertising testing by my own company and hundreds of its small business clients.

And remember this principle of advertising …

There are always two sales you have to make in business; firstly there is the person representing the business then next comes the company or product. Every business has to achieve the two sales, not just one, the product. Trust is the operative word.

If you skip the first part your sales will never be fantastic . If you do this well, your company may just become the next billion dollar company that takes over from some other company’s monopoly of the industry!

Think about this for your small business development and one day you could own a billion dollar turnover company too.

Let’s start with a basic question… What is a business?

There are lots of definitions that all get very complex , but there’s a better understanding of this if you’re a business owner and want your business to grow.

Business growth, whether that be profit, turnover, another office, branch or location all comes down to one subject, people. Because if you remove all the people out of a business, what’s left?

You don’t actually grow a business as a business is an intangible thing. A business doesn’t really exist as such. Its something people all agree exists. Staff agree, customers agree and suppliers agree a business exists. Yes it might have a name, a place of operation and products, but that still doesn’t make up all that is a business. So if you take all the people away, there’s very little left.

Let’s just say a business is really all about people.

When it comes to business growth let’s define that too.

Businesses all over the world , focus on one main category for growth and that is turnover increase. The aim of the director is typically to improve profit, but try to do that by focusing on increasing sales – i.e. revenue AND earnings .

When you focus on profit AND turnover improvement you are going down the path of having options not only two right and wrong.

The “best” way to carry out a task is the one carried out most competently in the shortest period of time.

This best way needs to be found by measuring. Then the best way is now the benchmark that needs to be explained with all other employees so all staff are now performing the tasks the best way. This increases net profit margins radically.

If you desire higher net profit margins from better small business management focus on the staff , and make them by-products of the systems (documented) that define what people need to carry out , with measuring of performance confirming the systems are working.

When you continually manage on these 3 areas (that every business needs to improve on constantly) your staff will do more so your turnover will go up with the same staff cost and that means net profit margins will go up as well.

The key to increasing net profit margins radically is to have employees made accountable to number based performance KPI’s). When all team members are focused through accountability from measuring their performance and are by-products of systems your net profit margins will sky rocket !