Spotlight on Marketing
Everything Works - You Just Have to Do It
There it is. The main thing you need to know about marketing. Any effort you make towards marketing yourself is effective - eventually. That's a secret most marketing firms won't tell you. They've got a million reasons why you should use their marketing product or service, but they might fail to tell you the primary reason for your success. Everything works.
However, the most important part of the rule is the second part: you have to do it. The marketing company can be pretty confidant you will have success with their product, because having spent big bucks for it, you are at least going to give it a try - and that means doing whatever they have told you to do. Money back guarantee, they'll say. They figure they can say that too, because if you don't get around to doing it, you're not going to want to call them up and confess. They'll also have acres of success stories, which they reaped in the first few days or weeks of a customer applying their product. Check back with those folks in a year or two years and see how they are doing.
What Works Best for You
Since everything works, the real trick is to find what works best for you. That's actually simpler than you might realize. What will work best for you will be whatever you are willing to do or pay to have done on a regular basis.
This is where the real challenge comes in and where that word from the first paragraph comes into play - eventually. You could go stand on a street corner with a sign every day and eventually you would get a customer. Some corners would be better than others. Some signs would be more effective. As you stood on the corner you might try initiating conversations with people who passed by or waving at vehicles.
I don't have to tell you that standing on a street corner is not the most effective marketing method for most businesses, but it will be a whole lot more effective than sitting at your desk waiting for the phone to ring. So what are you willing to do or pay to have done on a regular basis to promote yourself and your business? Do you have tools in place to keep your name in the marketplace even when you're too busy to stand on the corner with your sign?
How Can I Help?
I've been in marketing, sales and training for almost fifty years now. Maybe we could sit down and take an inventory of what you're doing and how its working for you. We can talk about things you've been thinking of trying or what you've seen work for other people.
As we chat, I may think of a few things that would be productive to try. When we're through you'll have a marketing plan. It won't be fancy. I won't have a slick binder to put it in. Maybe during the conversation we'll discover your website needs to be updated or you need to get on the Google Map and you'll hire me to take care of it. Or maybe you'll discover you just need to show up on your corner a little more often.
Why would I be willing to sit down with you and discuss your marketing plan, when it might not end up bringing me any business at all? Well, I've discovered something a great hamburger salesman once discovered, "The more I help other to succeed, the more I succeed." Remember, I said everything works and this works pretty well for me. Let's discover together what works for you.