3 Steps to Staying Ahead of the Game

Take a look at most businesses that have been around for 5 years of more and you’ll see that they are doing the exact same marketing they did 5 years ago. It might be postcards. They may market using a money mailer coupon. It might be networking at Chamber of Commerce events.

You’ll see that they tend to pick one thing that seems to work for them and they stick with it.

Now at face value, this might look like the right thing to do. Pick something that works and stick with it. But what happens when that one resource stops working? What do you do then?

Most of the time, they just sit there waiting for it to work again. They are stuck in their way of life and don’t try to make a change.

When you are marketing your business, you need to create multiple streams of marketing income for you business. Yes, if something is working, you should keep doing that thing. But you need to also look at other things to drive new customers in your door.

How can you leverage the things that already work?
What can you do to make what works already, better and cross promote it to another marketing venue?

As an example, lets say you usually keep in contact with customers via your email newsletter.

Start promoting your Facebook page and Twitter page as well. This gives you an additional way to keep your name in front of those existing customers at all times.

Get more interactive
How about doing a quick 5 minute video about one of your products.

Lets say you have a restaurant, you can do a featured dish of the week. Do an interview with a customer that always buys that dish. Upload the video to YouTube. You will get traffic from YouTube that way, which brings in more attention to your company, but you also can post it on your website and link to it in your newsletter. This gets them in the door and gives them a reason to come back.

Partner up
Do you know another business that might compliment what you do already? Talk to them about cross promoting each others services.

Carpet cleaners and dry cleaners do this all the time. It works like a charm.

Create your own little alliance of partners that help cross promote each other’s business.

Remember that in the game of business, you always need to be working towards change and adding new resources to your marketing mix. If you want to market you business effectively, you should never rely on just one place to get your customers from.

As you add more and more revenue sources to your business, you will become a lot more stable and will be able to adapt much faster if something does stop working.

About The Author:
Ely Delaney is a dad, author, speaker, marketing consultant and Founder/CEO of Your Marketing University. His goal is to teach marketing in a simple easy to understand format that businesses can use to help gain marketing ideas & market their businesses to boost sales.

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