Does Your Small Business Marketing Need A Health Check Or Do You?
I had hernia surgery once and I wasn’t able to exercise for a few weeks, which had a noticeable affect on my normally reasonably cheerful nature. I generally do at least three or four hours of hard cardio work every week (two of those with an excellent personal trainer in Bristol (if you want his details please email me on info@smallbusinesssalt.co.uk)), so not being able to do anything except slow walking was unbearable for me. As soon as I could train again my mood immediately lifted.
Another thing that makes me feel frustrated is when I am unable to write for a while. I really enjoy writing for my business and for my clients, so when I either have a period when there is simply too much going on that I do not have the time to do this, or I hit one of the creative walls that sometimes strikes me, I really miss not being able to write. It produces a very similar feeling to not being able to exercise which I think is interesting. I assume it produces the same feeling because I know that both exercising and writing for my business are very good things for me to do, so when I am unable to do them my mind and body feel deprived of their normal fix!
The point of explaining this to you today, is to ask you to thing about your business. When it comes to marketing your business, or taking care of your well being (for most small business owners if you take us out of the equation there is not a lot of a business left so our health is vital), what are you not doing at the moment that you intuitively know you should be doing?
Please take a moment to thing about this as it could be vital to your success. Are you failing to take good care of yourself? Have you been burning the candle at both ends for too long a period of time so you are generally feeling drained? I know we all have to do this for sometime as small business owners, but if you have to do it for sustained periods of time inevitably it will reduce your efficiency and productivity. Whilst you might hear stories of how small business owners put in 20 hour days for four years until they were able to sell their business for £10,000,000, I simply do not believe this is possible or true. There are times that you can do this, but if you do it consistently without any breaks you cannot maintain high standards. I often work 10 or 12 hour days, but if I did this every day for a few months I know that my creativity would completely dry up and I would actually become a hindrance to my business and to my clients.
When it comes to your business, are you failing to take the steps that you instinctively know are needed to produce more clients for your business in the near and distant future? Have you neglected to add any content to your website or your blog for a few weeks or months? If you are running a pay per click campaign, have you stopped reviewing it and changing the advertisement copy to improve click through rates? If you have referral systems in place, have you failed to thank your referrers or reward them with gifts or commission (10% is the usual introducer figure I find in all sorts of businesses if referral fees are to be paid). If you have advertisements running in newspapers or magazines have you tested changing the headline to improve response rates (remember there is ‘no treasure without measure’).
What could and should you do now to help your business and to help yourself? Plan in some time to take care of the things that you need to do and you can soon reap the benefits.