Kara Stanford
Strategic Marketing Consultant with over 25 years of experience.
CEO & Founder of The Marketing Spaces.
Kara Stanford
Strategic Marketing Consultant with over 25 years of experience.
CEO & Founder of The Marketing Spaces.
At times it’s tough for many businesses. Speaking to other business owners and those of you in our community, bad months can be summed up as, “I feel like I’m doing a lot of work for very little revenue.”
It’s at times like these, when the sales aren’t coming in as smoothly or as quickly as you hope, that it’s tempting just to get your head down and do a lot of marketing activity. While this is definitely the right thing to do to get cash in, it’s also important to make time for marketing strategy.
Why? To stop us all being ‘busy fools’.
When I set up my consultancy business 11 years ago, I had two years of frantic marketing activity to get it off the ground. I networked. I blogged. I did socials. I networked some more. And spoke at event, after event, after event. I got it off the ground. Then lean times hit. So I went back to my full-on activity. Then, one day, I actually stopped.
Tired of marketing stress and disappointing results? Let's turn things around!
I took the time out to review my marketing strategy. I looked at my marketing segmentation strategy and who the most valuable were. I looked at the services (my products) I was offering and which the most profitable was. I looked at my financial figures and realised my turnover for that Financial Year was hugely increased – with stress levels to match – but my profit was lower. Yes, I was taking home LESS money than before.
Why? Because I had been so busy ‘doing’ marketing and sales that I hadn’t realised until I took time out to look at it, that my marketing strategy was off. I had been pursuing the ‘wrong’ type of customers with a low-profit service.
That was when I adjusted course and chose to focus on a higher profit service (Strategic Marketing Consultancy) and a different segment (businesses who needed someone to help them think and plan, rather than deliver their badly-planned marketing on a shoe-string).
Please. Learn from me. If you are busy, busy, busy doing marketing and sales activities to get that cash in, stop. Are you focussing on selling the right products to the right customer segments? Or, like me, is all that activity going to result in less profit, more stress, and realising you’ve been busy for very little reward?
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