How well do you prepare for unexpected, potential business problems?
Some people are great. They cover all the bases and sleep well at night. Others are not so good; like the trainer I heard of, who had 30 people in a conference venue waiting for his seminar, only to find that his laptop was broken. He failed to take a second copy of his presentation, to use on a replacement laptop. The event was cancelled.
A USB thumb-drive with a copy of his seminar presentation would have cost him pennies and saved him thousands in refunds.
From a marketing perspective, I’m always amazed that so many business owners rely too heavily on a single, major source of new business, leaving them exposed and unprepared, if that source stops delivering.
I remember speaking with the owner of a printing business, who attracted most of his sales leads from a networking group he attended. Although it worked for him, others in the group saw little in the way of results, so the group folded. Overnight, he lost his primary source of new business. His income dropped like a stone and he ended up having to let some staff go, because he literally couldn’t make payroll. It took him almost 18 months to get back to where he had been, before the collapse of the group!
Your marketing strategy needs the right mix
As I have said many times, one of the secrets to a successful business, is to have a number of effective marketing processes working for you all the time, to form a marketing strategy. The most successful businesses I know, use 8 or more different forms of marketing at any one time (often more.) This broader approach to marketing provides 2 massive benefits:
- It means the business is never over dependent on any single source of sales or enquiries. This makes your business far more robust and better prepared.
- A number of effective marketing processes working together, creates something called compound marketing leverage. Like compound interest, compound leverage gives you a disproportionately large increase in sales; because the sum of the parts is greater than the total of their individual values.
If you are over dependent on a small number of marketing activities, the time to develop a broader, more robust and reliable marketing mix is now!
So, how many different forms of marketing are you using right now?