“What’s the bare minimum marketing I can do for my business?”

“I’m really busy, so do I still need to do any marketing?”

“What will happen if I don’t do any marketing for a while?”

These are all questions that I’ve been asked many times. They’re also questions I’ve asked myself recently. Here at Appletree HQ we’re nicely busy looking after a lovely bunch of clients. We’re not actively looking for more, as we’re happy working with the ones we have. That’s not to say that we will turn someone away if they ask for our help, and if they’re an ideal client. It’s just that we don’t need any new clients right now.

If you’re lucky enough to be in this position too, do you need to keep doing any marketing? Will anyone notice if you stop? What’s the minimum you could get away with?

To answer these questions, I’ll tell you how we’re dealing with it at Appletree.

The first question to answer is “What will happen if I don’t do any marketing for a while?” The answer is that eventually, the work you’re doing now will finish and you’ll suddenly find that you don’t have any new work to take its place. At Appletree, since we work with most of our clients on a monthly basis, rather than on projects, what would happen is that we’d lose a few regular clients (it happens – they become so successful that they decide to take on a full time member of staff to do all their marketing; or they retire.) If we stopped all our marketing activity, we wouldn’t be able to fill the gaps that they leave and that would affect our cash flow.

So you’re too busy to do any marketing? Really? If you feel you need to work long hours just to earn enough, it might be time to put up your prices. Once you’ve done that, look at the marketing you’ve done in the past, which has worked. Look at how you can fit some into your busy schedule. About 40% of the new business that comes to Appletree is generated through networking, so we look to attend about one event each week. Another 40% comes from referrals and the best way to get more referrals is by looking after your clients and doing a wonderful job for them! Surely you’re not too busy to do that?!

If you are really busy, what is the bare minimum marketing you can do? Again, look at what has worked for you in the past. Also look at the simplest ways to promote your business. Every month, we publish our email newsletter, Scribbles. It doesn’t take long to write and it’s sent to over 1,000 people – that’s a really simple way to keep in touch with a lot of people. Recently Scribbles brought us a new client – Pete’s wife had been reading the newsletter for about 5 years and recommended us to him when he said that his business needed some marketing help.

No matter how busy your business is, don’t stop doing your marketing! Do less by all means, but make sure that what you do is more focused and will still put your name in front of potential clients. One networking meeting every week, a monthly email newsletter, a few blogs, some tweets and lots of looking after our current clients – that’s all we’re doing, and yet the phone doesn’t stop ringing with calls from potential clients!

If you’d like a review of your marketing, to see what’s working and what else you could be doing to attract new clients, get in touch and we’ll give you some recommendations. Call us on 01635 578 500 or click here to email us.