How important is it to be consistent in your marketing?

Sam and Marcus discuss consistency in your marketing. Sam says the basic idea is decide what you want to in your marketing, and do it consistently and well. If you look at businesses that are doing well through their marketing, they are being very consistent. That doesn’t mean that all businesses that consistently market, do well.

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Planning

The first stage of marketing is planning. You need to have your ambitions first of where you want your business to be. You then need to think about what you need to do to get there, in terms of marketing. But, be realistic about what time you have for marketing or the budget you have for marketing. So be ambitious in your targets, but realistic in the time and/or budget you have for implementation. 

Marcus says things take way longer than you plan for. But, Sam said this can happen initially, but, if you are being consistent and doing things again and again, you get quicker and more efficient at it. 

Implementation

Once the planning is done you need to think about implementing it. Sam says a daily or weekly plan is essential for this. If you have a clear plan for your day or week then you can ensure you make time for your marketing, or whatever else it is essential to do in your business. Marcus thinks that with photography this is challenging as you have to do photo shoots. Sam says it’s the same for every business. Having a weekly timetable that is the same for every week, like a school, doesn’t work. It needs to be done on a week by week basis. This can be done by photographers the same as everyone else. It can be easy to spend all your time processing photos. It is important to set time aside for marketing, accounting and other essential business tasks. 

Use your weekly plan to help you implement your marketing plan consistently. 

Sam talks a little about the sort of thing your regular marketing might be, like building a community on social. As you do marketing you need to be monitoring your sales and leads and seeing if your marketing is working. Make sure you ask everyone who comes to you as a customer how they found you. They won’t remember every time they have come across you, but they will remember something. Use the data to help focus your marketing and trim away the stuff that isn’t working. But ensure you have been consistently doing your marketing for a good while before you judge it. It needs more than just a couple of weeks before you can judge it. Marcus and Sam discuss touch points and how many touch points clients have before they will contact you. Different books say you need a different number of touch points before a sale. But you certainly need a good few. And the closer together you can get those touch points the quicker you can move people to a sale. Remember when you are assessing your marketing, that some touch points will not  be mentioned by clients and if you remove it, it might be detrimental to your marketing. For example they may have forgotten about seeing yuoir posts on Linkedin. But, that doesn;t mean they didn't help in the process of moving them towards becoming a customer.

Marcus mentioned the idea of accountability groups. Where you hold each other to account. These can work really well at helping you getting stuff done. If you write a goal down its better than being in your head. If you add a deadline that’s better. But it’s a lot more effective if you then share these goals to someone that means you will put much more pressure in yourself to meet those goals.

Marcus and Sam finish by discussing common marketing mistakes. One of them is of course, not being consistent in your marketing.