Get your balls in the air.

Marketing balls, that is – what on earth were you thinking about?  But all joking aside, one vital thing that every small business needs is a multitude of initiatives all happening at the same time.  Because it’s only by doing this, that your business can be attracting new leads and customers from a variety of different sources.

One of the quickest ways to business suicide is to rely solely on a single advertising source to attract customers.

So – if you only take one thing away with you from our blog, let it be this.

Never, ever stop marketing!

And they needn’t cost you a fortune.  There’s a bunch of different marketing ploys you can use that barely cost anything.  Such as

• Networking opportunities
• Giving out business cards
• Asking satisfied customers to put a review on your website (what do you mean, you haven’t got a website…)
• Okay then, for anyone who hasn’t – GET A WEBSITE!  Any website – you can always upgrade it, just get yourself online.  Pronto.
• Posting comments on various blogs, forums and the like – offering relevant advice and leaving a link to your website

The list is endless – and these are marketing opportunities that will cost you virtually nothing – in monetary terms, at least.  But don’t ever forget that your time has a value as well.

So, combine these with your paid for advertising, and you start to have quite a few marketing balls in the air, all working for you.

But it doesn’t stop there.  Because you constantly need to be measuring the success ratio of every single marketing ploy you’re using.  It’s only by doing this that you’ll know which marketing is working for you and which isn’t.

And guess what?  By measuring the success rate, you can tweak, change or even ditch the marketing that doesn’t work – and increase your efforts into those that do.

Treat your business, and your business marketing, as a living thing.  It needs constant looking after, constant attention and constant adaptations to cope with an ever-changing market.  Once you get your head around that concept, marketing just became a whole lot easier.  (Not easy mind, just easier!).

Remember, with marketing you need to see a significant return on every marketing dollar spent.  And if it’s not working, it’s time to change.  And how do you measure it?  Simple – ask every single customer who rings, emails or comes into your premises exactly where they heard about you.

Get into the habit of it, and you’ll soon be measuring your marketing strategy without even breaking into a sweat.  So go on – get your balls up there…