Penny Wise and Pound Foolish

Have you ever thought about what your life would have been had you made that different choice? You know the one I’m talking about; the one that you lay awake at night and work out various scenarios about. What would have happened had things turned out differently?

Recently I sat across the table from a brand new marketing client and watched as her face went pale recalling the choice that she had made in the past several months concerning her business. It was not a pretty sight.

She recalled how she had decided to place all of her ‘proverbial eggs’ into that one hole ridden basket. You see, her company had been dying a slow death. Sales were lagging and she didn’t know what to do. So she decided that she had to do something. That something was a decision that fed the wolf that was at her door.

She decided to drop all print advertising and rely totally on word of mouth and hits on her website. This would have been a great idea had she had customers that were crazy wild about her service that would tell everyone they came into contact with about her and march them arm in arm to her business and a website that was SEO’d to the hilt for those customers who searched the web for her specific keywords. Neither was the case.

She felt good for the first couple of days thinking to herself how she had saved herself some money that could now be added to her bottom line. Then reality set in and her bottom line bottomed out.

No one new was coming into her store. To make matters worse, when her regular customers did come in they commented on how ‘quiet’ it was in the store and ended up leaving without making a purchase.

By the time she realized her mistake it was too late. To recover from one week of not advertising takes a good 4 weeks. Why? To understand the repercussions you have to understand why you need to advertise.

Reasons to advertise
1) To keep your name out in front of your customer, future customers and competition (nothing travels faster than a rumor that since they haven’t seen you advertise you must be shutting down)
2) To promote new products and services to your customers, future customers and competition
3) To show your employees that they are part of a thriving company that is always looking for more customers so that you can continue to pay their wages. Even lazy employees start worrying about their jobs when no one is walking through the door.
4) Showing people who have a vested interest in you like your investors, bank president, father-in-law that you are promoting your business so that you can make good on your note (this equates to if you don’t advertise you must not really want to be successful – something about seeing their investment promoting itself gives them the warm fuzzies).
5) You advertise to reach your competitors customers. Why is this important? You never know when they become unhappy. They need to know who to go to when times get bad with their current supplier.

Do you need more reasons to advertise? Let’s face it, my new marketing client had made a terrible mistake and almost didn’t recover from it. It took her three months of really, really low sales to begin to turn things around. Today, it is almost back to normal. Customers still walk in asking if things are picking up and she is still working to overcome the negative rumors of her demise. Eventually she will be able to put this behind her. It was a tough lesson to learn about Marketing the Invisible.