Avoid "Feast or Famine" With A Steady Marketing Diet
Copyright (c) 2009 Richard Seppala
How to Even Out Business Ups and Downs
Businesses of all sizes are now looking at their bottom line and realizing they’re hungry for customers. Suddenly, because of the recession, they’re cooking up new recipes for their marketing and advertising for the first time in a long time to try to feed their starving sales and revenues.
A year or so ago, those same businesses may have been fat and happy – and so overstuffed with profits that they didn’t really worry about their marketing and advertising efforts, let alone the Return on Investment (ROI) they were generating.
That’s because, when times are good, we easily forget they can turn bad. We begin to think the stock market will always be moving up, real estate will continue to rise in value and customers will keep flying through our doors.
And then we stop trying. What’s the point? We got it made, right?
Well, unfortunately, wrong. The Feast has turned to Famine and how well you survive the bad times will now depend on how well you marketed yourself during the good times.
There’s only so much time in the day – that’s a fact. And when you’re busy with existing clients, it’s hard to make time to cultivate new ones. But you need to make the time to make sure the necessary marketing and advertising is in place, and use ROI Measurement to make sure that marketing is effective and your generated leads are being handled properly.
Otherwise, you’re running a reactive business, not a proactive one. You’ll undoubtedly begin to lose some of your existing business just through natural attrition and you won’t have the new client base to take up the slack.
That means no matter how busy you are, you need to set aside the necessary time and resources to market continuously. That process includes:
1) Taking a step back and looking at “The Big Picture.” Going beyond the day-to- day grind to get an honest overview of where your business is and where you can take it is invaluable.
2) Creating an on-going marketing plan based on that Big Picture, to maximize opportunities and generate leads. What’s the best venue to reach potential customers? How can you generate the maximum number of referrals from your existing clients? What’s your marketing message going to be?
3) Measuring your ROI. Again, you can be doing what you think is amazing marketing and advertising – but if prospects aren’t responding to it, or, worse, are being mishandled when they do respond, you’re wasting time and money.
Hopefully, you’re not being too badly affected by the current economic downturn – but if you are, it’s never too late to put some aggressive marketing into place to start turning things around. Just remember – when things pick up again, continue to monitor and re-evaluate your marketing efforts. Don’t rely on the Feast when there might be another Famine lurking around the corner!
About the Author
I'm Richard Seppala, Your ROI Guy. Visit me at http://www.yourroiguy.com to find out more about how to make sure your sales and marketing efforts are winners.
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