If you’re ever feeling too good about your business, visit despair.com where you can find “demovitional” posters that will bring you right down to earth. A perennial favorite is the one that proclaims: “Customers: Maybe if we ignore them they’ll leave us alone.”
The sad truth is that for many businesses customers do, indeed, leave them alone. And a business—even a great business—without customers is a pretty sad place. It doesn’t matter how great your products or services are: Without customers, you’re not going to survive.
Customers, however, don’t just magically appear because someone starts a business. And that’s where marketing comes in. Unfortunately, when business budgets get tight, marketing is often one of the first things to get cut—leaving employees who don’t have marketing backgrounds to try marketing “on the backstroke” while they fulfill their regular responsibilities.
One of the problems with that is the fact that marketing today is dramatically different than it was just a few years ago. Companies today need to be able to integrate traditional marketing efforts such as direct mail, with a powerful website and social media presence in order to generate leads.
Simply generating leads, however, still isn’t the main goal. In order to be successful, today’s businesses need a carefully integrated sales process that allows them to nurture leads until that lead becomes a customer.
Those kinds of strategic activities, however, don’t happen “on the backstroke.” They require planning, processes and monitoring to ensure that they’re effective. So what do you do if you don’t have someone on staff with the expertise and the time to coordinate those things? And what if you don’t have the budget to hire someone with that kind of horsepower?
That’s when it may make sense to find a marketing partner who can help you with things such as business blogging, social media, content marketing, lead nurturing, analytics, website optimization—or any combination of those critical marketing functions.
If you’re struggling to generate leads and nurture those leads until they become customers, we encourage you to request a free 30-minute marketing analysis that will look at your current marketing efforts, analyze your website and your sales process, and leave you with actionable tips to improve your marketing (whether you use our services or not).
Wouldn’t your great company be even better with more customers?
