I am a bit of a car guy, motorsport in particular.

Not sure if you have ever watched a car race but there are some interesting parallels between car racing and marketing. The races are very strategic with lots of moving parts (no pun intended). They are quite technical in terms of getting the car set up right for the track and the conditions and, after all of that, the driver must be both flexible and creative while driving to a plan.

Here are things we can learn from motor racing when marketing your business.

1. It’s not a level playing field

In any motorsport category, there are big teams and little teams. And the money each has to spend on their cars, drivers and crew are all different. But no matter what end of pit lane you are at (at the top level, anyways) what you do notice is just how clean and professional their approach to race day is. From impeccable white garage flaws in an inherently dirty environment, to beautiful uniforms and spotless cars ready to hit the track.

The concept is simple – be clean and pristine and you will find it far easier to find and identify issues when they arise and it also promoted a disciplined and process driven approach. 

The quality of the competition is rarely an issue, these teams work tirelessly to put themselves in the best position possible on the track. Because they know that even their biggest competitors can have a bad day and when that happens they are there to capitalise. 

Ultimately, being in the race is half the challenge what great teams do is look for the areas where their competitors fail to make speed and focus their energy on that niche opportunity. 

And they work hard, relentlessly trying to perfect their approach to get an advantage.

Our approach to marketing should be the same.

2. Strategy is important


You can be the fastest driver on the track but ultimate you must manage tyres and fuel and this is where strategy is so important. 

The best teams are not only fast because of their drivers, they are fast because they are clear in the processes they use to achieve their speed. 

Marketing requires the exact same approach – create a strategy that is clear and build your processes around executing the strategy. Identify the opportunities for your business and develop your game plan around exploiting them.

3. Plan for the season not for the race. 


Marketing is a slow process at times. So how is it possible to compare it to something a fast as a race.

If you think about any sport, motorsport included, it is a season of games or races. In many ways, your marketing is exactly the same, although, we tend to call them campaigns. 

If you look at great race teams, they treat every race as an opportunity to test their strategy and test their equipment – You should be looking to do the same with your messaging and approach. 

But like the race team, at the end of the race no matter where you came (or how the campaign performed) look at all the data and understand what happened, and then trial, amend and innovate for the next round. 

We see so many small to medium businesses who expect results instantaneously which is understandable because it can be hard to invest money and not see an instant result. But the truth is each race has to be taken on its merits and in the knowledge, that it is a long season. 

So invest in a strategy and a plan over a 12-18 month period and learn and grow with each campaign.

4. Pick the best team you can afford

Winning is clearly the aim of any race but as was mentioned before there will be plenty of competitors out there with more money to spend on their marketing. 

This doesn’t put you out of the race – Remember if you are the driver you will never win if you have to jump out of the car at the pit stop and change the tyres and fill the fuel yourself. YOU NEED A TEAM. So, buy the best one you can afford and build a plan. Get to know one another and build trust. Let them make some mistakes and learn together. Neither the driver nor the team can be solely responsible for performance on the day – so work together.

5. Pick your moment 


Ok, so you have put in all this hard work and you have toiled with messaging, channel plans, social marketing and advertising placements…

It’s all going to happen, right?

No, it might not actually. You still have to turn up and perform on race day. 

I recently turned down a client who was prepared to invest in the marketing required to grow her business but it was clear to me that they didn’t actually have the resources, processes in place to deliver the marketing work. 

At the end of the day, what you say and the effort you put into telling your customers what you’ll do for them must be backed up with the ability to actually do it. 

And when you do – just like on race day this is where your team has to really spot the opportunity – because any race driver will tell you that despite all the work the ability to overtake and even win a race comes down to but a few opportunities per race. You need to be on the look out for the moment to make your move, be it capitalising on your competitions misfortune and reaching out to their customers or innovating your products or messaging to propel you past them during a key sales period. 

Just like the race you must stay alert and be ready for that opportunity – and that means working together as a partnership. Your marketing can’t simply be treated as semi automatic function.

Ok, I gotcha – I love small business; in fact, for me, some of our smaller clients are the most exhilarating to work with, because of their desire and energy to grow. But those businesses are rare and for many small businesses it can be their mentality that holds them back.

See if you recognise any of these traits.

1.    I have a small budget I spend on SEO – I can’t tell if works but I continue to do it because its important to be on “the google”
2.    We have a newsletter (we don’t write it we subscribe to a service and they provide us content we can brand)
3.    We do social media you know, we post on Facebook every so often.
4.    We have promo gear! We have branded pens (or coffee cups) and we give them to our clients!!!!
5.    I have a nice company car. It’s important to look good and I work really hard so it’s a nice treat and I can write it off!!!

If any of this sounds familiar you are in good company – I meet clients like this almost every day; to be honest, I have met with about 12 businesses in the last month that virtually fit this description to the letter.

It always fascinates me, when speaking with these business owners because they are very smart, have taken a huge risk and made a huge investment in starting and running their businesses and yet they seem to overlook a fundamental aspect of their business – MARKETING!.

I am an avid listener of Podcasts and one of my favorites is – The Mark Bouris Show, I highly recommend it to anyone reading this. 

Mark interviews a wide array of entrepreneurs and business owners and across all sorts of industry sectors and one of the key takeaways is just how much emphasis these businesses place on a clear marketing strategy that reaches and informs their prospective customers of their product and brand position.

These businesses have as part of their price point and business planning, factored in marketing as a cost of sale and you should too!

I have never done marketing before and it seems expensive?

Now, I know for many small to medium businesses who we speak to, who have already found some success but are looking for further growth, it can often be quite hard to understand how to, now, factor in marketing activities when their entire pricing model and profit margin have until this point been achieved without any real marketing costs factored in.

They want to grow, they want to do marketing – but they also want to upgrade the car, do the reno to the house and take the family away for that trip to Hawaii.

We get it…. We do too.

So how can it be done?

The first thing is to set some clear objectives for your marketing initiatives and ensure you measure the return on investment against them.

The truth is no marketing can be done without some sort of an investment, both of time and money. But our approach for businesses, who have never marketed themselves before, is to do it in conjunction with product development or product “re-packaging”.

That doesn’t mean a new brand or carton, but rather how can you package your product differently to charge differently for it.

To do so provides an opportunity to build in the cost of marketing without impacting on your existing products or the margins and for many business owners it makes the costs involved more palatable as opposed to simply investing in something as intangible as marketing!

Let’s look at an example.

Recently, we worked with a client who had a successful travel product. It sold really well and they did little to market that product.

They were looking to achieve some serious growth and asked us to provide a strategy to help them market themselves better.

Their aspirations were very high but their budgets were very low.

It was a bit of a conundrum. If they were unable to spend money on marketing how could we reach enough people to drive the sales they wanted?

The margins in travel are not particularly high these days. The internet has made the self-service travel market very large and the airlines, accommodations and tour operators have cut sales incentives to a bare minimum to agents as they place a far less pivotal role in aiding the transaction.

However, our client has a unique position in the market and their clients value the service they provide. But upping the cost of their service was not an option.

We advised them to work with us to develop a strategy. During our strategy process we looked at each type of product they sold, and a breakdown of the most valuable products and customers they have. It is always interesting to walk through this process with small to medium clients because often they don’t have a clear picture of exactly what products, and who, makes them the most money.

Following on from the strategy, we were able to work with them to develop a new product that from the very beginning had a marketing cost built into its retail value.

By promoting the new product as an extension of the services already provided the company could create and service the product with very little cost in overhead; and with the marketing costs built in, they felt comfortable that there was a very clear business case and plan that was measurable in its own right.

By promoting the new product, we were able to build a momentum around the brand that was engaging to existing customers as well as reaching out to an whole new audience.

Now it could be argued that the cost to the business of developing a new product and the marketing costs ultimately comes out of the same pool of money so the net effect is the same. And that is true to an extent, however, this approach had two distinct outcomes for the business that investing in marketing alone may not have had:

1.    It changed their focus from the cost of the marketing itself and instead they became invested in the idea that this new product, which cost very little, to deliver (over and above their core product offering) would actually fund their marketing initiatives – protecting their existing margins but leading to long term path to growth.

2.    The second, and perhaps a more important outcome, was that it changed how the business perceived itself. After years of steady success, this new product was innovative and gave this business a reason to re-engage their suppliers, staff (plus it put a spring in all their steps) and they felt like they were thought leaders and ahead of their competition which in, itself changed, their attitude.

Results

Feedback thus far is – enquiries in the first 3 months have risen and the response to the new product has been very positive. They have re-engaged a large proportion of their suppliers who have actually offered to financially assist some of their marketing initiates and it has already added an entirely new demographic of customers too. With all the additional communication in the market place they have indicated to us – monthly sales could rise by almost 18% over the next quarter.

We’ll keep you posted.