Become known through consistent marketing and referrals
Anyone who has ever advertised has most likely gotten the same message from their advertising rep. You need consistency, or you need to repeatedly advertise. Now before you stop reading, let me assure you, I am not writing this article to encourage you to do regular, expensive advertising. Instead, we need to look at marketing in a much broader, truer sense of what marketing is.
There are many ways to market yourself, your company and your products; and advertising is just one of them. Just as I am not going to tell you to take out a bunch of ads, I am not going to tell you to stop advertising if advertising is working for you. However, I will agree with the advertising reps in saying that if you are going to advertise, you need to commit to repeating your message enough to be noticed.
An important element in all marketing is to get yourself known and to do enough repeat messages so that your past, present and future clients will remember you. Marketing to each of these groups is equally important. Sometimes your message might be the same for each and other times you may have different messages for different groups. Although it is sometimes hard to believe, not all of our clients always remember that we are there to help them. Even those that we are in communication with may not know the full range of our products and services, or even that we do want their future business and referrals from them.
Although the different venues for marketing are important, it is even more important that we ensure consistency in our “outflow”. Unfortunately it is often the case that someone sends out one letter, one fax or one email, and then decides it doesn’t work because there is not an immediate response. In a sense it’s like expecting to get a marriage proposal after a first date. Sure it can happen, but that usually isn’t the way it works. Just like in dating, our promotional messages may need to be repeated enough so that the prospect starts to feel comfortable with us.