PROMOTE! PROMOTE! PROMOTE!

That’s the mantra any business owner or marketer should live by.

Here’s a few questions for you before we start:

• Are you afraid of sending out a newsletter more than once a week? Don’t be.
• Do you have a gut feeling that it’s intrusive to post on Instagram more than 3 times a week? Your gut is wrong.
• Would you rather grow your brand organically? It may never happen.

Do you feel triggered by that? That’s tough love, baby.

But I’m not being facetious. I stand by all of that and more. Just look at what successful brands do. Are they being conservative with their marketing efforts? No way, José.

In my experience, you CAN’T do too much promotion. The only thing that should ever limit you is cost, not volume. If you can’t do more because you can’t afford it, that’s fine. We all have limits. But if you don’t want to do more because you think you’re doing enough or it would “put people off”, you’re just plain wrong. Sorry, not sorry.

So Why Is Marketing Important?

They say it takes 20 years to build an overnight success. And that’s if you promote the hell out of it. In very basic terms, marketing helps you achieve three things:

1. Inform potential customers of your brand’s existence
2. Convert potential customers into actual customers
3. Build your brand-customer relationship in the medium to long term

In other words, marketing creates a direct line of communication between you and your customers, which allows you to convince them to spend (and continue to spend) their money on your products or services.

What Happens If You Don’t Do Any Marketing?

Unless your customers are psychic, they simply have no way of knowing that you exist. They may find you by chance, but that’s not a business, that’s the universe throwing you a bone.

I’ll use an analogy that I’ve used with my clients many times:

Whether your brand is B2B or B2C, for many of us today, when starting a business, our first action is not to open a retail location. It’s to open an office and launch a website. And there’s a huge difference between the two.

When you open a street-level shop, you’re likely to get passing traffic. The volume will depend on location, but most shops are situated somewhere with at least some occasional footfall. And that alone can sustain a business. It’s how traditional high streets operate and many of these businesses don’t do much online promotion at all — think corner shops, takeaways and pubs. But even they still promote in their own way. They have shop signs, window displays, stickers, and special offers. All these things are designed to let customers know what they offer and entice them in.

If your website is the storefront of your business, the story get’s more complicated. You don’t have passing traffic. Launching a website is the equivalent of opening a shop in the middle of a very large field with no motorway in sight. How are people going to find you? You’re not within eyesight and there’s no walking path.

If you were in this situation you would need to make sure that potential customers who are travelling through or live in the surrounding area know that your business exists.

• You would need to go to the local village and tell locals about your shop
• You would put up billboards on the motorway at the nearest exit
• You would put up signs at the entrance of your property

In other words, you would need to promote your business.

When you run a business without a prime retail location (you may be at home, in an office building or an industrial park), you need to think the same way. How on earth is anyone going to find your brand? How are they going to remember you?

What Marketing Channels Should You Use?

Thankfully, there are almost endless ways to market your brand. Here are some common ones:

• SEO
• PR
• Social Media
• Influencers
• Paid Advertising
• Email Newsletters
• And, of course, Promotional Products

Of course, they all have a cost: money or time. And, as you know, time is money. So it all comes down to how much money you have.

You also need to consider whether you have the resources to properly pursue every marketing channel or focus on just a few. If you can do more, do more. But, as they say, it’s always better to do a few things well than a lot of things badly.

So get to it.

Learn. Test. Perfect. Repeat.

Whatever you do, PROMOTE! PROMOTE! PROMOTE!

The purpose of this post is to emphasize the importance of marketing and encourage you to re-think your limits. In a future post, we’ll discuss some of these marketing channels in more detail to help you promote your business better.

Until next time!