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Is your marketing important?

Ever heard the old adage “If it is important you will find a way, and if it isn’t you’ll find an excuse.” Well, it applies to your marketing too – often most of all. 

Marketing usually becomes important to a business at two significant times:

(1) When times are tough, your pipeline is thin, and your business isn’t generating the revenue it needs to.

(2) When you get too busy to think, and you need help to manage the overflowing quantities of submissions and proposals and keep up with your communications and events.

But what about at other times? How important is marketing really to your business on a day-to-day and week-to-week basis? Do you use it to form and promote your services, explore opportunities and build your reputation?

Your marketing and PR is one of the critical foundations on which your business’ reputation is built, and the ongoing framework in which it is displayed.

If you get it right, in a services business, your marketing becomes the story people tell to each other about what you know, how you use your knowledge, and why they should do business with you.

Or in the case of a product business, it is the story that establishes your product as interesting, and helps to built desire and drive purchase

But what criteria does your buyer evaluate your business’s reputation on?  How are they making a judgment on your business and how can you market into it? Here are some questions you might need to ask yourself.

What’s  your visibility in the marketplace as a leader in your industry?

What’s your customer’s ability to succeed through interacting with you?
  • Guest speaking
  • Thought leadership and articles
  • Events hosted by you
  • Blogging/article posting to an interested audience
What high profile projects or transactions have you done recently?
  • Billboards on projects
  • Publicity in media
  • Shameless self promotion
  • Advertising
How well connected you are with people who can make things happen?  What’s your influence?
  • Involvement in influential networks
  • Demonstration of these networks through guest speaking
  • Publicity in media
  • Collaboration with other parties

What’s your specialist technical capability? Every services firm must have a specialist technical capability…

  • This is mandatory…
  • Include it on CVs, in proposals and in all your materials.
Prominence of your company brand in the marketplace?
  • Sponsoring industry activity
  • Articles and blogs
  • Advertisements in media

What’s your perceived knowledge of your market?

  • Articles written by you in popular media or on blogs
  • Guest speaking
What about the group of people that you are already working with?
  • Client testimonials
  • Referrals
  • Networks around your business
It is important to consider what your business wants to build a reputation in, and how this reputation is perpetuated through your marketing. A lot of these things can be hit and miss unless they are part of a broader strategic plan.

Have you considered what your business does regularly? What it wants to be known for? And how your reputation is built over time by doing the things that are important, regularly or irregularly… depending on the reputation you want.

Whether you make marketing a priority is almost entirely up to the business owner or company leadership team. They set the framework from which the rest of the company takes the lead.

 

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Rebecca Wilson

Rebecca Wilson

Rebecca Wilson is Managing Director and Principal Consultant of professional services and growth marketing firm Stretch Marketing, Rebecca and her team provide strategic business development advice, support and implementation to professional service providers and high growth entrepreneurial businesses throughout Australia.

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