Do you consider marketing to be a cost or an investment in your business?

In business, marketing is perhaps the ultimate equalizer. Millions of companies are competing every day, and most of them are using more or less the same methods of attracting customers and selling to them. The companies that work their marketing strategies best tend to have the best level of profit and success. Those that do it poorly don’t stick around for long. But the vast majority of business owners are mired in that big mediocre middle. They’re doing “okay.” They’re surviving and making some profit day to day — but the vast majority of them will never really take off to produce truly exciting, robust levels of profit and growth.

I believe a marketing strategy should make a company fly like a jet airplane while all others plod along on the ground. Far too many businesses today are being held back by one-dimensional thinking, and set-in-stone practices that may help “stay the course” and play it safe, but never really let an enterprise blossom and thrive.

Let’s say a company buys an expensive print advertisement in a major, high circulation publication. Let’s say the ad costs £25,000. But now let’s say that ad only results in £20,000 in new profits. In other words, the advertisement resulted in a £5,000 loss. Most business owners would say: “Well, I got burned on that situation. I’ll never buy an ad in that publication again, or, “I’ll never buy an ad like that again!”

They way you mentally conceive of marketing — of what marketing actually is — will have a profound effect on how successful you will be at achieving excellence. One of the biggest mistakes many business owners make is to consider marketing as fundamentally “as expense.” How often have you heard someone say, “Well, that’s the price of doing business”? But marketing, when done right, does not “cost you money,” it “makes you money.” You must began to think of marketing as a cash generating tool. Certainly, spending £25,000 on an ad can seem like an outrageous expense. But if that ad means you earn £30,000 — a £5,000 profit — it’s not an expense at all, but a certain key to wealth.

Marketing done right, done scientifically, and with a healthy dose of common sense can be a near unlimited source of new profit. If a man or woman has unlocked, discovered or created winning, cash-generating marketing tools, that true entrepreneur knows that using them is never as expense, but a leveraging action for the production of wealth. In a sense, marketing is like — yes — alchemy!

Of course, much depends on you. Do you have what it takes to search like the alchemists of times past for marketing gold in today’s business climate? Whatever the case, you’ll have an interesting time finding out.