An expert is urging small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to step up their marketing efforts if they want to see increased business and turnover, managers.org.uk reports.

Marketing guru, Stefan Drew says that smaller businesses need to enhance their promotion tactics in order to encourage more sales and a healthier bottom line.

Rather than blame the current economic downturn for this inhibited attitude towards marketing, Drew says that it is in fact endemic of small businesses. He concedes that both starting a business and carrying out marketing duties is a difficult combination and that ‘many don’t know where to start’.

Other business owners, he adds, pay a fortune using methods that might work for competitors but not for them, emailschools.info writes.

It’s a message that might resonate with some new franchisees – marketing knowledge might not necessarily be something that they possess when they start a franchise. Consequently, marketing novices might wish to ask the franchisor for advice on how to promote the brand locally. However, the efforts can yield impressive results.

Drew asserts that being able to market a business is ‘just as important as being technically capable.’

“Starting a business has never been easy and marketing has never been easy,” he said. “The reason a lot of businesses fail is not because they are incapable of doing their job; if nobody has ever heard of them and they have never marketed themselves, they are not going to make a living out of it.”