Maintaining Your Marketing: Not Fun but Important

The Sprocket Report

If you don’t maintain your marketing, brand awareness starts to decay sooner than you’d think and there’s nothing fun about that. One question you may be asking yourself:  is good enough ever good enough? Read on for some thoughts on how to keep up.

You have no doubt heard the phrase “If you aren’t growing, you’re dying.” While there’s some truth to that, don’t forget that there are many ways of “growing” in your business and not all ways need to happen at the same time. An apple tree grows roots first – which can’t even be seen – before it leafs out, flowers and bears fruit. And apple trees don’t keep growing to the sky either. There’s a natural progression. So what’s the natural progression of marketing to best grow your business?

The roots of your marketing strategy

If you’ve never done any marketing, every little bit will make a huge difference so go for the low-hanging fruit first. Be sure your business is listed correctly on web directories like Google My Business, Bing Places for Business and similar sites. Basic listings cost you nothing but a little time to fill out your address, phone number, website URL and other important information to help customers find you.

Next, establish a presence on social media. Try working each one seriously for a period of time to see which is the best at reaching your specific audience. Trying to do all of them at once will make you crazy and may be ineffectual if your effort is divided. Building your online presence is fun because you can be a little creative and it's satisfying to plant your flag and claim your place on the internet.

Maintaining your marketing strategy

While it’s exciting in the beginning to see comments on your social media and visits to your website, you’ll soon realize that once all your friends and family have Liked you, social media marketing gets less fun. Now it’s important to have a content calendar and a maintenance strategy. It will feel like work because it is and you’ll be tempted to automate the process or let your consistency slide because there are other calls on your time.

Resist the temptation! At least focus on one or two media outlets and give your best to those audiences. Try not to fall into a rut, but faithfully follow your strategy. Your analytics at this time may show only small increases, but they will DEcrease shockingly fast if you don’t work at staying in front of your audience.

When is your marketing good enough?

The whole point of marketing is to grow your business, so be prepared to handle the growth. If the quality of your product or service suffers, unhappy customers will pump out negative marketing that can be hard to fight. It takes more than slick marketing to keep sales growing.

Even good, consistent strategies will eventually stop producing results. Be aware of new marketing options and explore them deliberately, one at a time, so you will know whether or not a new option works for your audience.

Surveys show that marketing budgets will be about the same in 2017 as they are in 2016, continuing the shift to online advertising rather than traditional print/radio/tv. Important to note is the fact that businesses budget for marketing. Do you?

Your website and social media platforms are the roots of every marketing strategy. We want to be your marketing partners, so give us a call today. We’re happy to help your business grow.

Kate GingoldKate Gingold

I have been writing a blog with web marketing tips and techniques every other week since 2003. In addition to blogging and client content writing, I write books and a blog on local history.

Other posts by Kate Gingold

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Full biography

I have been writing a blog with web marketing tips and techniques every other week since 2003. In addition to blogging and client content writing, I write books and a blog on local history.

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