I’m not supposed to do this. This is not what you expect to hear from me. As a digital marketing consultant, why would I ever discourage anyone from marketing?
At the end of the day, I want to recommend marketing when it will be successful. And there are certain conditions your business must meet before you are ready to market.
Of course, we wholeheartedly believe in marketing and have seen it transform businesses countless times over. But, these are things you should consider before enacting a marketing strategy.
If you don’t have these in place, that’s alright! Part of our job is making sure your marketing plan connects to all these other elements. All that being said, don’t start marketing until…
You’ve Identified Your Business Goal
Marketing is great. It can expand your business exponentially. But you should not be marketing… just to market.
You need to have a specific goal in mind when devising a marketing campaign. Are you trying to get more users to your website? Sell more products? Drive foot traffic to your location? Increase your customer purchase per transaction?
Even if you’re in the early stages, and only looking for pure brand awareness, you should have that goal defined. When it comes to setting goals, you’ll hit the target you’re aiming for. It’s impossible to hit a target you don’t have.
Hand in hand with this conversation, is the conversation about your ideal customer. Don’t start marketing until you have defined your ideal customer.
What are their demographics? Where do they live, work, and play? What stage of the customer journey are they in? How do they communicate, and what channels do they use?
These are all essential questions in defining your target customer. Once you know who they are and where they spend their time, it will be much easier to connect with them.
Then you can look to the next challenge…
You Are Ready To Accept New Business
It’s funny. Most of the time, the conversation is about what you should do for marketing, and if it will work. That’s a big hump to get over.
But sometimes, folks don’t realize what will happen on the other side. The marketing is likely to work. What if it works really well? Do you have the infrastructure in place to accept new business, fulfill it well, and continue expanding?
Marketing gets the leads to your door. Then, your customer intake process takes over. Do you have friendly voices ready to answer the phones? Do you have someone monitoring contact form intake to respond to requests?
Then, do you have the staff to implement the services promised? Is your equipment and infrastructure prepared to handle growth? Is your business scalable—could keep functioning the same way with 2x, 5x, or 10x growth? Don’t start marketing until you’ve addressed these key questions.
Marketing exists in the ecosystem of your branding and reputation. The more effectively you can fulfill your services, the more effective your marketing will be. When both sides are solid and ready to go, you’ve primed yourself for a powerful, ever-expanding business cycle.
You Have Time To Keep In Touch
As marketers, we can get you 75% of the way across the bridge between you and your customer. But you must take the final step. We are not your business. We are not you.
Once onboarding is complete, we can handle many aspects of your campaigns automatically. However, we’ll still need you to keep us up to date on new products, promotions, and seasonal changes that happen on your side.
We are more than happy to update your creative, messaging, and strategy to follow your flow. But we can’t do that if we don’t know what your flow is.
We also depend on you as clients to tell us the full story about results. We have data up to a certain point when it comes to clicks, calls, and website actions. But that’s not the same as having access to your sales, accounting, and fulfillment data. We need you to let us know how leads fare once they cross over from us, to you.
All in all, we treat marketing like diet and exercise. It’s healthy to have a good all-around presence, and there’s no single silver bullet tactic. So, if the attribution picture is not crystal clear, that’s alright. However, the more you can tell us, the more we can fine-tune our approach.
While marketing is not rocket science, it’s no walk in the park either. To really benefit from it, don’t start marketing until there is someone on your team with dedicated bandwidth to keep up with the marketing initiatives. This way, we can build a standing relationship to learn and grow together.
You Are Committed To Learning And Growing With Us
One thing we’ve come to love about marketing is that it also involves a level of coaching.
The conversation is not always about how well the marketing strategies will work. Sometimes, it shifts to the fact that they deserve to work. Your business deserves to grow. Your service is needed and effective. Your ideal customers are out there waiting for you, and they just need to be connected in the right channels. You have what it takes!
This is mixing in some psychology. If someone ultimately doesn’t feel good about their business, or confident in what they offer, they will subconsciously hold themselves back. It doesn’t matter how much you market a lame duck. A lame duck will not fly.
Once you commit to a marketing plan, you are also aligning the values in your life to commit to business—and personal—growth. This can be daunting for some. There will be unforeseen curves in the road that require pivots. But a marketing team worth their salt will be there to handle those twists right alongside you.
At the end of the day, it’s exciting. It’s exciting to be in marketing and to be such a big engine for growth. At Gig Strategic, we are committed to learning and growing with you. We believe in the growth mindset! And we will do the heavy lifting. All that we ask is that you are committed to those same values.
If you are ready to grow and take on the future, get in touch with us about a marketing plan. We have stellar offerings for local businesses looking for digital growth, including SEO, web development, and even some sleek new technology like Social Mirror ads.
Contact us today to get started!
