Over the years, I’ve realised that when it comes to marketing, there are three distinct types of KBB businesses:
#1 - Those who do no marketing (or very little), and rely solely on word of mouth
#2 - Those who do a few campaigns throughout the year; maybe radio for a couple of months, then a flyer-drop a couple of months later, or a newspaper ad with an offer to stimulate sales
#3 - Those who see their marketing as a process and a system, and have properly bought into the idea of 'rhythmic customer acquisition'
You won’t be surprised to learn that the third type generally have businesses that operate more consistently, with less stress.
You see, when you view marketing as a process, rather than a series of one-off initiatives, you quickly recognise that by building a marketing system into your business, you can dramatically increase the predictability of your revenue.
Once you’ve got a marketing system built into your business, marketing isn’t about ‘Facebook Ads’, or ‘Email marketing’, or ‘Google Ads’.
Or at least not those elements on their own.
Instead, your marketing ends up looking more like a machine, where you:
1. Put 'traffic' into the top of the machine (connections from your website, Facebook, Google, leafleting, radio, or print ads)
2. That traffic is then nurtured via a combination of email, telephone, website retargeting ads, and direct mail – the more of this you can automate, the better
3. Qualified leads come out the bottom of the machine
Sounds simple enough, right? But the key here is, if you build that infrastructure, you no longer have to be reactive and constantly churn out campaigns.
In fact, once it’s all built, you don’t actually have to do much, other than be involved in the manual touch points, and of course the actual sales process and delivery of the work.
Building a marketing system gives you a machine that just whirrs away in the background - bringing in new contacts, building trust and relationship with those contacts, and spitting out new leads.
What this does, is give you greater confidence in your customer acquisition, since you’ll have the basic data that tells you that this machine creates X numbers of customers a month.
And, when you foresee the need for more business, you can turn up the speed of the machine, or bolt-on another part to it.
Likewise, you can turn it down when you're starting to run beyond capacity.
Have you got a machine like this in your business? If not, hit reply - I'd be happy to talk through what you need to do to make it happen.
