It might seem logical that if your business is overflowing with customers you can slow down, or even stop your marketing efforts, right? This is especially true if your quantity of customers keeps you busy. As logical as it seems, it’s probably not a correct way to think about your marketing. Below are ten reasons why you should consider continuing your marketing efforts even if you are busy.
- Refine Your Customers
If you have one or more customers that aren’t ideal, continue your marketing in order to grow your pool. Ideally, you want to have enough clients that you can say “no” to any clients you want to or fire any clients that give you problems. By having a plethora of clients (thanks to your marketing), you have this option.
Even if all of your clients are pleasant to work with, by growing your pool you can refine your customers. Perhaps you can find customers that are willing to pay a higher price point. Perhaps you get customers who are raving fans and tell others about you. Perhaps they’re more knowledgeable. Whatever the refinement you’d like to see, leverage ongoing marketing to increase the quantity on your waiting list will get you there.
- Keep Momentum / Ride The Wave / Customer Retention
If you’ve got more work than you can handle, good for you! Use marketing to ride the momentum wave. Momentum is really hard to get in business so anything you can do to avoid losing it is worth the endeavor.
Additionally, marketing can help you with customer retention. When an existing customer sees a reinforcing message from you in one of the places their attention is focused, it can help build excitement and help them know they’ve made the right choice in you.
- Optimize Your Acquisition Costs (Make More Money!)
As you continue to grow and refine your marketing, you will begin to optimize your ad spend and reduce your customer acquisition costs. If, for example, it cost you $200 to acquire your current customers, by continuing to optimize your marketing you can potentially cut that to $100 — meaning you make more money per customer!
- Create Scalability / Growth
One of the best ways to generate growth and scale your business is by growing your customer inflow. The best way to grow your customer inflow is by expanding your marketing efforts when you are busy and at capacity.
- Changes in Market / Economy / Culture
As you’re well aware, the economy is constantly changing. So are cultural values and priorities. This means that the security and stability of your business is ever evolving as well. While it seems like you might have more work than you can handle, a minor change in circumstances beyond your control could change everything. A solid marketing strategy can help mitigate some of the risks involved with running your business in an ever changing environment.
- To Prevent Loss of Brand Awareness
Just as important in mitigating the risk of customer loss is maintaining your brand awareness. Have you ever thought about why companies such as Coca-Cola and Home Depot spend millions of dollars a year to advertise on TV and online? Occasionally it’s to introduce a new product or service, but mostly it’s to keep their brand in front of their audience. When someone is craving a soft drink, Coca-Cola wants an ice cold Coke to be what immediately comes to mind. When it’s time to replace that door knob, Home Depot wants to be certain that you think of them as your home improvement warehouse. These brands make millions of dollars per year. They have all the business they need yet they want to be sure to stay top-of-mind.
In the same way, even when you have more work than you can handle, you should continue your marketing efforts in order to prevent the erosion of your brand awareness.
- To Quell Competition
One reason to keep your brand awareness high is to keep the competition at bay. Sure, you have all the business you can handle now, but what if your market share begins to slip to your competition? You might suddenly find yourself not so busy anymore because all of your potential new customers are going to your competitors who are advertising to capture their attention. By keeping consistent with your marketing, you’ll be able to quell competition threats to your success.
- Identity & Reputation Management
One area that most business owners don’t give enough attention to is maintaining your reputation. Without consistently bringing new, fresh customers into your business…customers that you can impress with your outstanding customer service, you are one bad review from having a reputation problem. However, if you’re continually onboarding new customers into your marketing experience, you have a plethora of opportunities to impress and get good reviews which minimizes the impact of one disgruntled customer. Ongoing marketing can help with this effort.
- Internal Identity, Mission, & Vision
Another overlooked benefit of marketing is the impact it has on your internal teams. When your staff sees that you are willing to continually invest in the ongoing growth of your business, it reinforces your mission and vision and enhances their confidence in job security. When you invest in marketing, it motivates them to perform at a higher level. This might not show up in a yearly job review or in day-to-day conversations, but don’t underestimate the importance of this tactic.
- Maximize Previous Marketing Efforts
The final in this list of reasons to continue your marketing efforts even when you have more work than you can handle is because it maximizes the money you’ve already spent.
Let’s say you’d spent money on building the base of a pyramid. Several layers in, things are going well. It’s easy to place the next level of bricks. You’ve got lots of bricks coming to you and you can’t get them placed before the next bricks show up. But what if you stop ordering more bricks and you get to the top of your pyramid and have no materials left. A pyramid with really great base levels but no top layers is really a waste of the base.
Marketing is similar to building a pyramid. You’ve done a good job in building your business. You’ve invested in the right marketing efforts (even word-of-mouth growth comes from investment) and the base layers are all set. If you stop now, you risk wasting part of the money you’ve spent to get here. Instead, you should continue building on the base you’ve built by continuing with the marketing strategy that got you here.
If your business is booming with customers, it might seem logical to slow down, or even stop your marketing efforts, right? Particularly if your quantity of customers keeps you busy. Even though it seems logical, it’s probably not the best way to think about marketing. Hopefully the ten points above have given you a few different ways to think about this topic going forward.
If you’d like assistance with your marketing strategy, contact us for a no-obligation chat about how we can help.