Lie #137 When You Get Busy, Stop Marketing

Run­ning a small busi­ness is a lit­tle like farm­ing. How so, you ask? It’s about plant­i­ng now to har­vest lat­er. The time to plant isn’t when you’re hun­gry, but weeks or months in advance! There are many traps that we can fall into that hurt busi­ness. One com­mon snare is the idea that when you are busy you can cut back on mar­ket­ing efforts. Your day­timer is over­full, your crews are busy, and you don’t feel a press­ing need to mar­ket, so you don’t. I see the results of this in the slow sea­son; from Decem­ber through Feb­ru­ary, I get numer­ous calls say­ing, ​“David, help! My phone isn’t ring­ing!” A well-run busi­ness knows the impor­tance of con­sis­tent mar­ket­ing. While it is pru­dent to increase or decrease your mar­ket­ing accord­ing to need, it is impor­tant to keep your brand in people’s con­scious­ness. I have recent­ly received a num­ber of leads from con­trac­tors who want my help, and I’ve had good con­ver­sa­tions with them, but then I don’t hear back. Why? They are busy now, the phone is ring­ing and times are great. Sev­er­al have asked me to call them back lat­er when things set­tle down. The prob­lem is, when things set­tle down it might be too late! Con­tin­ue to Brand Your Business My advice is to main­tain your brand through con­sis­tent mar­ket­ing. Cre­ate a mar­ket­ing sched­ule and cal­en­dar, then assign who will be respon­si­ble for each task through­out the year. For exam­ple, if you want to do email mar­ket­ing, decide if you are going to do it month­ly, quar­ter­ly or 6x a year. Then, put it on a cal­en­dar, assign the task to some­one in your com­pa­ny or out­source it and don’t devi­ate. Stick to your plan. Imple­men­ta­tion is one of the oth­er main rea­sons busi­ness­es stop mar­ket­ing. They don’t have any­one keep­ing them on track, so they put things on hold. Steer the mar­ket­ing ship through all four sea­sons of your busi­ness year, no mat­ter what you encounter. Don’t go off course or get dis­tract­ed when you are stay­ing busy. Brand­ing your busi­ness takes time and patience. Kind­of like farming!