Ever heard the old adage “If it is important you will find a way, and if it isn’t you’ll find an excuse.” Well, it applies to your marketing too – often most of all.
Marketing usually becomes important to a business at two significant times:
(1) When times are tough, your pipeline is thin, and your business isn’t generating the revenue it needs to.
(2) When you get too busy to think, and you need help to manage the overflowing quantities of submissions and proposals and keep up with your communications and events.
But what about at other times? How important is marketing really to your business on a day-to-day and week-to-week basis? Do you use it to form and promote your services, explore opportunities and build your reputation?
Your marketing and PR is one of the critical foundations on which your business’ reputation is built, and the ongoing framework in which it is displayed.
If you get it right, in a services business, your marketing becomes the story people tell to each other about what you know, how you use your knowledge, and why they should do business with you.
Or in the case of a product business, it is the story that establishes your product as interesting, and helps to built desire and drive purchase
But what criteria does your buyer evaluate your business’s reputation on? How are they making a judgment on your business and how can you market into it? Here are some questions you might need to ask yourself.
What’s your visibility in the marketplace as a leader in your industry?
- Guest speaking
- Articles (written by or about you)
- Blogging/article posting to an interested audience
- Events hosted by you
- Industry or event sponsorship
- Social media
- Guest speaking
- Thought leadership and articles
- Events hosted by you
- Blogging/article posting to an interested audience
- Billboards on projects
- Publicity in media
- Shameless self promotion
- Advertising
- Involvement in influential networks
- Demonstration of these networks through guest speaking
- Publicity in media
- Collaboration with other parties
What’s your specialist technical capability? Every services firm must have a specialist technical capability…
- This is mandatory…
- Include it on CVs, in proposals and in all your materials.
- Sponsoring industry activity
- Articles and blogs
- Advertisements in media
What’s your perceived knowledge of your market?
- Articles written by you in popular media or on blogs
- Guest speaking
- Client testimonials
- Referrals
- Networks around your business
Have you considered what your business does regularly? What it wants to be known for? And how your reputation is built over time by doing the things that are important, regularly or irregularly… depending on the reputation you want.
Whether you make marketing a priority is almost entirely up to the business owner or company leadership team. They set the framework from which the rest of the company takes the lead.
