How Much Home Business Marketing Is Enough
How Much Marketing Is Enough?
The suggestions in this article can make marketing sound like a never-ending process. Although it will continue for as long as you own your business, there are several circumstances indicating you might need to take a break:
• When you are tired of talking to strangers (or people, period), give yourself a break. That’s enough for the day. If you still need to do some marketing activity, focus on researching prospective clients or some other activity that doesn’t involve meeting the public. (Just don’t make “research” the only marketing task you perform.)
• When you need all of your time to perform work for clients, go ahead and take a brief marketing pause. (By brief, I mean one to two weeks.) If you are always taking “breaks” from marketing, you might need to look at your schedule and figure out a way to make the marketing process a more natural fit. For instance, you might make Friday night a postcard-labeling-andstamping party, with pizza afterward. When you receive responses from the postcards, schedule the meetings when you would be taking a break from working anyway - perhaps at lunch or over mid-morning or mid-afternoon coffee.
• Longer projects might require your full-time attention. That’s okay - but compare your marketing cycle to the project’s time frame and schedule marketing appropriately. For instance, let’s say that you are working on an intensive project lasting six months. Your marketing cycle (from initial marketing activity to signed contract) generally lasts two months. This means that during month four of your large project (at the latest), you need to gear up and begin marketing again.
Why? You don’t want to come off a large project with nothing to do and no money coming in - you want to have other work to do as soon as the large project ends. At some point, your marketing will downshift. When you have steady work coming in, month after month, you are probably at a point when you don’t need to do special marketing “pushes,” such as postcards or ads.
Here’s one work at home business example:
Let’s say that it is early April. You look at your spreadsheet and see you have work lined up for this month (April), as well as May and early June. In a week or two, work for the rest of June is pretty much lined up. At this point (and assuming your monthly total of all business is sufficient to meet your needs), you can probably avoid huge mailings (for example, mailing postcards and flyers), speaking strictly for marketing reasons, and other marketing activities that seem to take up too much of your time. At this point, you want to shift to “maintenance marketing” - one or two regular activities you do each week that will continue to generate fresh leads, yet take a minimum of time and money. (By the time you get to this stage, you will know precisely which activities those should be, based on what has worked and not worked in your home based business.)
Here’s an example: Several years ago, I “downshifted” to a maintenance marketing schedule. While I might send out a postcard mailing every one to two years, on special occasions, I’m not sending two to four mailings a year, as I used to do when my business was new. Nor do I write as many articles or perform as many speaking engagements solely for the publicity. But every week, I attend BNI (Business Network International), and network with other small business owners for about two hours. This is now my primary marketing activity. If I see a company that would make a particularly good client, I might write the key decision maker a letter introducing myself. For the most part, however, the bulk of the marketing is being done during those two hours per week. (I also meet with BNI colleagues over lunch or coffee, and this might add another hour per week.)
That’s not a lot of time, really - particularly when compared with the early years of my business, when marketing was a 20–30 hour per week commitment. The loss of a client, a project falling through, or other setback might bump up my marketing to 5–10 hours per week, but only for a brief period of time.
Tags: home based business, home business, home business marketing, working from home