Marketing can, in our mind, be directly compared to fitness. The more you do the better it is. However, if you are doing the wrong exercise or using the incorrect technique those ‘gains’ may be somewhat lacking.
Marketing is something that is active, yes you may create some flyers here and post some social media posts there, but as the famous quote goes, nothing lasts forever… so what do I mean by this? Well, marketing is something that you practice and do actively.
What happens if you only do one exercise?
Quite simply, whilst you can improve an area of the body for example with the humble bicep curl, you will only improve that area. Yes, there will be some benefits in the area around the bicep, and you will increase your heart when you do the exercise, but it is only your bicep that will see the real benefit.
Marketing is the same, ultimately it comes down to conversion. You advertise or promote something and someone goes “yes please, I would like to buy that”. However, to garner that attention, you need to deliver that message to the right places.
Whether you want to appear on search engines, raise your profile on social media or pay for advertising opportunities to get in front of the right people – it all requires equal attention. In fact, we would encourage you to work on multiple of these areas and yes this does require investment.
Develop your marketing programme like a fitness plan
Look at your marketing goals, what do you want to achieve? Like with all goal setting get specific – i.e. we want to win more work in X over the next three months. Then ask the question, how much would that work yield in terms of revenue? What are our costs when it comes to customer acquisition? There is your marketing budget, at least for a start.
Now, look at what marketing you are going to do and where. A good place to start is to nail down the offer on your website and create a landing page with a contact form. So you have established a target to drive traffic too, now what? How are you going to drive traffic there? Google Ads, Organic social media, paid ads, QR codes on advertising, out of home advertising, TV and cinema? There are loads of options available.
It is all about putting the various marketing channels in place, this is the equivalent of the different exercises you may do in the gym.
Then we hit the hurdle of cost. Yes, it does cost to advertise and do proactive marketing. The cost of a gym programme is: a membership, your time, effort, sweat coupled with the discipline that comes with a sensible diet.
Expecting marketing success overnight?
You may get lucky and go viral! However, in most instances you won’t, so now you move on to the monitoring and adaptation phases. What is the progress on the marketing activities, do you need to adjust the plan? If the answer is yes, then do it.
When it comes to the budget, hold your nerve – all to often people are (naturally) concerned with expenditure and don’t give the campaigns a chance to run. Absolutely monitor your campaigns and adjust them as you need to, this is where the learning is done after all. Check and re-check your work to ensure that the language is clear, and the experience is positive.
Review, adjust your targets and go again
When you get a customer or the end of the campaign, review the position. Decide what you need to do more or less of and what new things you may need to try. Review your budgets interrogate the data, look at enquiry to conversion rate – pick it all apart to make a clear assessment.
In summary…
Marketing needs to be a rounded function in your business, yes you can do one thing but you will only get a small proportion of the results. Do a few things, then the game changes and puts you in the driving seat.
We have done this with a current client, following some initial marketing activities broadening the approach they have found their work pipeline has increased and they have work booked for the next 10 weeks at the time of writing, the intention is that demand continues to grow and they can forecast their work long term, which then allows them to consider future growth and business decisions.