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Too late! It’s next year already
It’s too late! In the world
of marketing business services and service businesses, it’s
next year already.
About now, you’ll be getting
all kinds of advice on how to prepare over the holiday period to
market your business next year. But unless you’ve done more
than just think about that, you’re almost certain to get a
late start to 2005.
If you’re not part of the
retail sector’s Christmas sales hype, you will have clients
and customers who are. Even service businesses have their share
of “have to be done by Christmas” projects.
Stuck between an immovable deadline
and the promise of stress release is not the best time in which
to do some serious thinking and planning.
But if Christmas has already overtaken
you and next year’s marketing is still a mixture of detailed
plans and firm intentions (or maybe firm plans and detailed intentions)
here’s a simple three-step “plan for a plan”:
- Consider the problem areas in marketing your
service. You’re welcome to my research report on The
7 Most Common Marketing Challenges faced by Service Businesses
and How to Recognise Them.
- Define the important marketing problems your
business faces. These are not necessarily the apparently urgent.
These are the areas which, if resolved, will have the greatest
positive on-going impact on your business.
- Make a start on dealing with the important
problems. You do need to develop and follow a logical plan, but
there’s also paralysis by analysis. Sometimes it’s necessary
to start in the middle, just to make a start.
Focusing on problems may sound
negative, but it’s the key to identifying opportunities.
Is your problem that potential
clients don’t know you exist (visibility), that they don’t
see the value in what you offer (perception), or that you’re
spending so much time dealing with prospects you can’t get
any work done (marketing process)?
Is your budget being swallowed
up by areas which don’t generate a great deal of business?
And is that because of lack of response, poor conversion rate, or
both?
Which generates the most business
for you — the strategies which you pay to implement, or “word
of mouth”? In your case, does the latter result only from doing
good work and providing excellent service, or also from a continuous
campaign to ramp up those effects?
Of all the things you do to market
your business services or your service business, how many provide
leverage by extension into other communication channels, how many
can be leveraged by adaptation to other uses, and how many can be
leveraged by repetition at less (or no) cost?
That’s enough to think about
right now. Christmas is nearly here.
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