I hear this a lot, marketing isn’t relevant to my business because I get most of my business from word of mouth. Let me ask you though, if they used you two years ago and haven’t interacted with you at all in those two years, why are you so sure that they are coming back?
I think many people who say this conflate marketing and advertising. Are you utilising your very valuable existing client database and marketing to those potential future customers?
Advertising
Call me a lawyer, but I generally start by defining things. Advertising is very much grounded in ads, doesn’t sound too revolutionary right?
Advertising is about presenting your business in a publication, traditionally a print publication. It is a specific part of marketing, it may work for your business, but it is only part of marketing.
Marketing
Marketing is broader than advertising. Marketing is about promoting you and your business with a view to selling your services.
Marketing could use advertising but often doesn’t. Marketing is about a strategy to sell your services. Marketing is about promoting your strengths and in the context of this article, reminding your existing client base why you exist and why they need you.
I don’t need to do marketing to get word of mouth
Do you know how many adds people see per day? If you Google it you will get a lot of different answers, 2,500 or 10,000 for instance. This is just advertising. We cannot put a number on how much other input a person’s brain is being exposed to and having to process every day.
If they saw you two years ago are you really front of mind? Even if they were very happy with your services do they understand your full range of services and how you can help them, today?
How do you compete with all this noise?
By communicating with your clients in a concise, relevant fashion. By communicating something to them that is valuable to them. By being a source of authoritative, trustworthy content.
This authoritative, relevant and trustworthy content will also help you with any Google algorithm, and valuable interesting content will help you with your social media marketing, but that is another topic.
If you are front of mind because you are communicating with your client base in this fashion then they might pass that information on to a friend even before the friend asks for a referral. Furthermore if you are front of mind then they might be aware of your full range of services, and areas that you can help that they don’t normally associate with your profession.
The trouble is, who has time to create this content?
Creating and maintaining a client newsletter is fiddly and time consuming, I am not going to lie. Running a business is just a long to do list of important things, and while you might acknowledge that a client newsletter is important are you actually giving time to doing it, and doing a good job?
Yes you are busy, it is important though because you have a database of people who are interested in your services. You don’t need to pay Google or Facebook to find these people you already have their information. But what do you do with that information?
You can’t just spam them and you can’t only sell at them or else your content is neither valuable or interesting. A badly planned newsletter is probably worse than none at all, and will result in Google sending all of your emails (including personal emails) straight to junk mail.
Talk to me about a helpful, interesting and relevant newsletter for your existing client base, how often you want to send it, and how I can help you with that.