When Marketing Can Be Too Much of a Good Thing

Marketing your business is beneficial no doubt, but more isn’t necessarily better. It’s important to know when it’s time to ramp up marketing efforts and when it’s best to scale back.

Interested in Business?

Get Business articles, news and videos right in your inbox! Sign up now.

Business + Get Alerts

When the leads are hot and the phone’s ringing off the hook, it’s easy to get greedy and want to keep the leads coming. But sometimes more isn’t better, like when you have more business than you can handle. 

More calls and more leads without the time, staff and resources to serve those customers only leads to wasted money and disappointed potential clients.

Unfortunately, that happens a lot with marketing that is “set it and forget it.” You end up paying for leads and calls, but you’re booked out so far that those leads have no choice but to call a competitor who can serve them sooner. Why waste your money on leads you have to pass off to someone else?

Take control of your marketing. Here’s how:

1) Be thoughtful about when you should ramp up the spend and when you should throttle back.

Make sure that if you have Google Ads, Facebook Ads or any of your marketing on autopilot, you adjust those you can control to accommodate your schedule and your business. 

If you lose a team member or you get booked too far out to meet customer expectations, slow things down. When things start to get a little too slow, ramp your marketing efforts back up again.

In other words, abandon the “set it and forget it” mindset and be nimble with your marketing. 

2) Come up with a marketing calendar for the year.

Another way to take control and be proactive rather than reactive with your marketing is to pay attention to what you’re spending on outbound marketing, map it out and plan ahead. 

Here at Spark Marketer, we recommend that all our clients create a marketing calendar for the year. When your marketing is mapped out, you can keep leads more manageable and consistent. Ultimately, that means you can provide better service and meet your customers’ expectations, providing them the services they need when they need them. 

Plus, when you have a plan, it’s easier to pivot and adjust when things come up. For example, losing an employee or getting a massive job that’s going to require the effort and time of everyone on your team. With a plan, you’ll know what to turn off and what to ramp up — and when.

Who should make your marketing calendar? It would be easy to just download a marketing calendar from a website or copy what some other company is doing, but that may not necessarily be what is best for you.

Your business is not like every other company. Your location is not like every other location. So your marketing calendar shouldn’t be from anyone or anywhere else. It should be something you’ve designed specifically with your business’ goals, limitations, schedule, location and market in mind. 

A Final Tip

We’ve come across business owners who aren’t willing to take any risks or spend any money on their marketing. They want results, but they don’t want to put in the time or budget to get those results. That’s a surefire way to never really experience what marketing can do for your business.

You have to give it time, and you have to test. Testing requires spending money, sometimes without seeing any return on investment at first. But if you really want to be successful, you can’t just try something for one month and then give up because you didn’t get the results you wanted. You’ve got to give it time to run so you can see what’s working and what’s not. Here at Spark Marketer, we recommend letting any new marketing efforts run for at least three months before making a decision one way or another.

Before you decide what is and isn’t working or what to do next, look at the data. Data never lies, and it’ll help you make smarter marketing decisions and know when to throttle up and when to throttle down. That way you can keep business steady but not over- or underwhelming.

About the Authors

Carter Harkins and Taylor Hill are the co-founders of Spark Marketer, a Nashville, Tennessee-based digital marketing company that works primarily with service businesses. They’re also the co-hosts of the "Blue Collar Proud (BCP) Show," a podcast that’s all about having and living the blue-collar dream, and the co-authors of the book Blue Collar Proud: 10 Principles for Building a Kickass Business You Love. They're also co-creators of the award-winning app Closing Commander, which helps contractors close more estimates effortlessly. Both regularly speak at service industry trade shows and conferences across the nation. Visit www.facebook.com/sparkmarketerwww.facebook.com/bcpshowwww.facebook.com/groups/bluecollarproudnation or www.facebook.com/closingcommander.



Discussion

Comments on this site are submitted by users and are not endorsed by nor do they reflect the views or opinions of COLE Publishing, Inc. Comments are moderated before being posted.