When Do You Need Marketing?

The answer to that question is “all the time”.

I often notice that many small business owners treat marketing like something that can be turned on and off. I see this happen especially when the economy is soft. The key indicator is that I get unbelievably busy because businesses decide they probably should market to try and find new customers.

The good news is these businesses seek out help, looking for someone to guide them in their efforts so they achieve success. But for every one business that calls me or another marketing expert, there are many that try what I’ve called the “Chinese Menu” approach to marketing – trying to mix and match disparent marketing activities – and their business will get busy again. Some call it the “binge marketing” approach. In either case, all you get is a bad case of heartburn and not many additional clients.

Unfortunately, that belief is the demise of many small businesses.

Effective small business marketing is not an activity to be done only when things get quiet, but should be constantly and consistently happening in your business. Marketing needs to be a continuous activity whose activities feed off each other, ensuring your business stays top of mind to your current customers and new prospects.

In addition, stopping and starting marketing interrupts the process. Marketing takes time to take effect and when you shut something down, it is really hard to kick it back up. Plus stopping and starting marketing doesn’t give you enough data to know whether something is working or not. The key is to put a marketing effort in motion and let it run, evaluating the outcome and tweaking the tactics when need be. Starting and stopping marketing activities is guaranteed to give you less than stellar results.

Benefits of continuous marketing:

• You build awareness and brand differentiation for your business by being visible to your prospects and clients;
• You establish a solid reputation for your business by marketing your expertise through articles and blogging;
• You distinguish your business from the “competition” by staying visible and promoting your expertise;
• You can evaluate your marketing efforts by the results you are seeing in your business. If they work, keep doing them; if they don’t work try something else.

Marketing takes a little time each week, ensuring your business stays visible to your clients. Plan to network, blog, write an article, update your profiles on LInkedIn and Facebook, contribute to a Twitter conversation, add some additional Internet marketing activities, be active in social networks and ask a client for a reference or testimonial. All of these take a few minutes to a couple hours but the payoff can be substantial.