This article was originally published in The Midwest Pawnbroker Magazine:
The National Federation of Independent Business found that 72% of small business owners feel inundated when it comes to marketing their business. If this feels familiar, then this article will help focus your efforts and tell your story in the marketplace so that you can build trust, relevance, and authority with your audience without feeling like you’re missing out on opportunities.
Here are five ways to focus the marketing efforts for your pawnshop and avoid overwhelm:
1-Start by Setting Clear Goals
There’s an old saying, ‘If you don’t know where you’re going, any map will get you there. Similarly, if “get more business” is the goal, then any marketing tactic will appear to work. The main reason small businesses don’t perceive any growth is that they lack clear goals. They focus on adopting new tactics without clearly understanding what will best fit their unique business needs. Your marketing goals need to be clear and communicated to your entire team so that everyone knows what they are working towards as a company.
Imagine going on a fishing trip with a friend and having a friendly wager of who can catch the most by the end of the day. You’ve got a tackle box full of a wide variety of lures and bait and you adjust your approach throughout the day depending on conditions and how the fish are biting. By the end of the day, you’ve got a full bucket of fat fish ready to filet and fry and are sure you’ve won the bet.
By contrast, your friend drops a grenade into their section of the pond and within minutes, dead fish begin popping up to the surface along with all sorts of other debris. Your friend has made a lot of noise with seemingly little effort, and their output is clearly more than yours. Looking at all those fish scattered on the shore, and you feel defeated.
The problem is that your friend has so many dead fish on the shore, including some that have been blown to bits, it’s impossible for them to make sense of it all. There are too many fish to filet effectively and there’s debris and trash everywhere to be cleaned up. By the time they get to the fish fry, most of their catch will have spoiled. What seemed like a great idea at the time has made a big mess!
That’s why a goal of “more” or “most” never works. Instead, when setting goals, you need to be concrete. Goals like “get more sales” or “go live every day” are not necessarily linked to measurable growth to the bottom line. Instead, it’s important to set achievable, measurable, realistic, and time-bound goals that grow your business in meaningful ways and bring in the types of customers who deliver real impact to your bottom line and don’t end up rotting on the shore.
2-Create a Simple Strategy
Outlining a simple plan will help you focus on specific tactics so that you can achieve your goals and grow your business. You can begin with a timeline of just the next 30 then 60 and ultimately, build a rolling 90-day viewpoint so that you always know what’s coming without making the future feel too intimidating.
Your marketing success should be measured tactic by tactic so that you’ll know what’s worthy of re-investing your time and resources into later on. Introducing too many things at once make that measurement more difficult which is why the next tip is so important.
3-Focus on a few Marketing Tactics at a time
Embracing every marketing tactic that comes your way is expensive, chaotic, and challenging to sustain. It also makes it impossible to know what’s working and can drive your costs through the roof. Start with practical and proven tactics, then build strategy as you go.
If you’re unsure where to start, set a goal to take on mastery of one new tactic per month from each of the four critical marketing areas for pawnbrokers: traditional, digital, PR, and community:
TRADITIONAL: Traditional marketing tactics are those that are not dependent on technology. There are plenty of examples of pawnbrokers succeeding with low-cost traditional marketing tactics like customer loyalty programs, token economies, loan guarantee cards, warranties, and max cash guarantees. You may also consider paid traditional tactics such as billboards (now known as Out of Home or OOH), television, radio, and newspaper—all of which will have different outcomes depending on many factors that vary from one market to the next.
DIGITAL: Digital tactics should begin with a modern website updated frequently with new information, easily found in search engines, and accommodates all visitors with ready answers to their questions from any device. Next, you can move on to a consistent social media approach that informs and empowers your audience. Finally, email marketing can round out the essential digital tactics for your shop. Start by setting a goal to master these three considerations, website + social + email as a start.
PUBLIC RELATIONS: Public Relations or PR is the professional maintenance of a favorable public image, typically involving the media or other trusted third-party sources. Public relations matters to pawnbrokers because public opinion matters to lawmakers. Good PR begins by establishing a proactive relationship with the media and influencers in your market and remembering that a reporter’s job is to produce stories, whereas your job is to promote and protect your brand.
COMMUNITY: Community marketing is the most important of the four tactical areas for pawnshops since more than 90% of consumers have never done business with a pawnshop. No matter where you are located, most of the people in your community have no idea how your business works. This unique quandary sets you apart from other small businesses in more readily understood fields like dentists, mechanics, salons, or restaurants. Pawnshops are frequently misunderstood; when you focus on helping change perceptions through quality relationships in your community, you tap into the cheapest and most effective form of marketing—word of mouth.
4-Project Management
If marketing is everybody’s job, then it’s really nobody’s job. Therefore, you need to consider who is responsible for what and by when so that you can focus on building your reach and accommodating the new growth. Your approach for managing and overseeing the execution of marketing needs to make sure that you remain in charge of managing your brand reputation, even if your own understanding of the tactics is limited. If you try to take on too much and delegate too many other people, you’ll quickly feel as if you’ve lost control which can be disorienting and cause you to shut down. Your marketing strategy doesn’t have to be massive to be effective. Actually, the more you’re able to simplify, the more successful you will be.
5-Retention Outweighs Recruiting.
There seems to be countless talk in the industry about recruiting more customers and making noise to be noticed by new customers. Yet, best practices in marketing tell us that existing customers are significantly more likely than the average consumer who’s new to your business to spend more, buy more, and recommend your brand to others. Increasing customer retention by 5% can increase company revenue by between 25 and 95%. Therefore, it’s important to focus your energies on fostering your relationship with existing customers through strong customer loyalty programs, good personal communication including handwritten notes, perks and benefits for VIPs and more.
What would you add to this list? I’d love to hear from you! Email editor@pawnbrokernetwork.com!
This article was originally published in The Midwest Pawnbroker Magazine: http://midwestpawnconvention.org/pdf/advertising-rates-deadlines.pdf
