It’s easy to let marketing your business or actively seeking new sales slip through the cracks when you’re flush with business. Or, when the economy is sluggish. But these are the times you should be putting more efforts into developing new business and branding your company.
Don’t cut your marketing budget
In the case of a bad economy and slower sales at your company, you’ve probably been tempted to cut your marketing budget. After all, it doesn’t always show a direct correlation to results, so what’s the harm in reducing it for a few months?
Plenty. Investing in marketing is what will help you, maybe not today, but tomorrow and down the road. What you invest in doing today will pay off plenty.
Fortunately, marketing doesn’t have to be a costly endeavor. Social media, content marketing, press releases…these are all very inexpensive marketing tools, especially if you’re willing to learn how to use them yourself.
Fill your pipeline
And if you look for new projects like I do on sites like Elance, where you can bid on work, keep doing it, even when you’re busy. Carve out time in your schedule to focus on new lead development. Sometimes it can take another company weeks or months to make a decision about who they want to work with, so you might not even need to start on a new project for a while.
Additionally, you can stay in contact with people you meet when networking during your busy season. Then when things slow down, you’ve already nurtured that relationship, and can reach out to see if you can provide your services to them.
Staying in front of consumers is more difficult
These days, you can’t tweet once a week and expect to gain new followers and attract visitors to your website. You need a steady stream of activity online so that you maximize your exposure to new and existing customers. That takes effort. Disappearing online for even a few weeks can render you obsolete, so commit to showing your “virtual face” at least a few times a week on different channels.
You can easily schedule social updates ahead of time, so even if you don’t have time on a weekly basis to update your social media profiles, you can still give the impression that you’re online. Schedule blog posts as well so you maintain consistency in what you’re posting.
Never, ever let marketing take the back burner. Do what it takes to make it priority: schedule to-dos on your calendar. Employ the help of your staff or freelancers. Make an effort to get your marketing and lead gen done.
Images: ”businessman hand working with new modern computer and business strategy as concept /Shutterstock.com“
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