from my email archives:
How Much Marketing Is Just Enough? C.J. Hayden, MCC ==============================
In my early years as an entrepreneur, a wise mentor taught me
about the "just enough" principle. "An entrepreneur's to-do
list is endless," she said. "If you ever want to be able to
work less than 60 hours a week, you need to figure out how much
of anything is just enough."
The one area of entrepreneurship that probably generates the
longest to-do list is marketing. When you think of all the ways
you could potentially market your business, and compare that to
what you are doing now, the implications can be terrifying.
Even if you worked 100 hours per week and had a marketing
budget equal to last year's total revenue, you could never
tackle it all.
But if you can determine how much marketing is just enough to
bring in the level of business you want, as well as pay for
itself, you can create a functional marketing plan that allows
you to sleep at night. The trick is finding that just-enough
point.
Take networking, for example. If you attend three networking
events per week, and at each one you make three or four useful
contacts, is that enough, too little, or too much? Well, that
depends on whether you have enough time to follow up with the
people you meet.
If you are able to follow up with each of your new contacts
appropriately, a three-times-per-week networking frequency is
sustainable. But if find you are scrambling to make contact
with that many new people before they forget who you are,
you're probably attending too many events. You've exceeded
"just enough" and are now wasting your time.
The same principle can be applied to prospecting. At what point
do you stop adding new leads to your prospect list, and
reaching out to people who don't yet know you, and instead
concentrate on closing sales with the folks you already have in
the pipeline?
Take a close look at the prospects you already have. Have you
followed up with every one of them within the last thirty days?
Or if you already know their needs are urgent, within the last
ten days? If not, you should probably slow down on collecting
new leads and spend more time on follow-up. Or if you're on
top of all your follow-up activities, you should back off
there, and focus on adding new prospects to your list. Either
way, you should stop at just enough.
What about publishing an ezine, writing a blog, or sending
email broadcasts or postal mailings? How often is just enough
to publish or mail? The answer will vary depending on your
goals. If you are publishing or mailing to increase your
credibility or build relationships with your audience, you'll
be seeking different results than if you are trying to elicit a
direct response in terms of enrollments or purchases. But there
is always a just-enough point to be found.
With a blog, for example, try this experiment once you have
some regular readers. Write a new post weekly for two weeks,
then twice a week for two weeks, then daily for two weeks. Keep
track of how much time it takes you, how your readers respond,
and what impact it appears to have on your goals. Then go the
other direction, and post only twice per week for two weeks,
then just weekly for two weeks. What do you notice?
You'll likely discover there is a sweet spot, where the amount
of effort you put in correlates to what you get back. Going
beyond that point and doing more has little additional impact,
but doing less than the required threshold reduces the payoff
so much that your efforts seem wasted.
No matter what marketing approach you choose, the secret to
finding the just-enough point is to start looking for it.
Instead of blindly trying to do everything, or blithely
ignoring what you don't seem to have time for, become rigorous
about comparing what you are doing to the results you are
seeing.
Determining how much marketing is just enough may turn out to
finally be the answer to finding just enough clients.
Wings for Business, LLC
P.O. Box 225008 | San Francisco, CA 94122
Phone (415) 981-8845 or (877) 946-4722
http://www.getclientsnow.com
http://www.gethirednow.com
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