The Key to Marketing Effectiveness: Persistence

If you Google the word marketing, you’ll get 633 billion results. With a few keystrokes, you can get advice about analytics and SEO, content marketing, social media, email segmentation, remarketing, the importance of mobile, buyer personas and focus groups, and on and on and on. To the average business owner, the information deluge is exhausting. You just want to know what works.

Plenty of marketing companies will answer that question for you—and you’ll pay dearly for it. In 2016, the United States’ advertising industry brought in nearly $104 billion, and the projected ad spend in 2017 was nearly $219 billion. Yet, only four in 100 businesses make it past 10 years and only 50-percent of small business start-ups are still around after five years.

Clearly, simply throwing more and more money into your marketing budget won’t guarantee success. If we’re being honest, nothing guarantees success. There’s simply no magic bullet. There’s no one-size-fits-all, perfect combination of strategies and tools. Wouldn’t it be great if there were a formula? Something like AdWords CPC + daily Instagram stories + three ebooks + weekly blog posts + 100 Facebook reviews = 50% business growth year over year.

That would be amazing. But there’s no such formula.

There, is however, one marketing strategy that’s more likely to bring you success than any other: persistence.

To be persistent means to continue “firmly or obstinately in an opinion or course of action in spite of difficulty or opposition.” Far too many small business owners agree to try a new marketing approach “for a little while,” and they expect an undersized budget to produce outsized results—right away. And when those results don’t come? When they encounter obstacles or difficulty? They quit.

We get it: It’s tough to watch your money disappear down the digital marketing drain. But with the right (read: persistent) approach, that pain is temporary.

Here’s why good marketing takes time:

A friend of mine farms winter wheat. He plants seeds in September or October, and he harvests in late May or early June. In February, if he doesn’t like how things are going with the wheat, he digs it up and replants it across town.

Um, no he doesn’t. That would be ridiculous. Instead, my friend pampers that wheat—investing whatever it takes to make that field successful. He’s persistent.

Too many business owners do the ridiculous thing. If their marketing isn’t producing immediately amazing results, they pull the plug—long before they can reasonably assess the actual potential outcome.

You know that Facebook friend with the home-based business who only interacts with you when they’re hosting a pop-up party and they want you to buy a dress, a purse, or a make-ahead meal crockpot meal? Don’t be “that friend” to your potential customers.

Consumers have all the information they need at their fingertips these days, but they aren’t just looking for a particular product or service. What they really want is a company whom they can trust. Your marketing can help build that confidence, but just like in real relationships, it takes time. It requires persistence.

If you need a root canal, are you going to the dentist who has written one article called “5 Steps to a Painless Root Canal” or to one who’s published dozens of articles and has a page full of five-star reviews (two of whom are from people you know)? Sure: We’d choose the second guy, too. And so would all of your potential customers.

To be blunt, consumers want to know two things: You know what you’re doing, and you’re not going to rip them off doing it. The only want to establish that kind of credibility is through thoughtful, persistent marketing efforts that add value to consumers’ lives. That’s not going to happen in a single, three-month-long marketing “campaign.”

Repeat business is great business. But if you want to grow you’ll need new business, too. In other words, if you stop your marketing efforts when you think you have enough clients, sooner or later you’ll have too little work.

Marketing isn’t a one-and-done task. To be effective, small businesses must invest time and financial resources for the long haul. Your strategy may shift over time (in fact, it’ll have to, given new technologies and platforms), but a persistent effort will keep your brand in front of new people all the time.

Successful small business owners tend to be long on grit and short on quit—particularly in their marketing efforts. To keep current customers coming back and to win new business, persistence is key.

The truth is, creating a consistent and compelling marketing isn’t easy. But it’s worth the effort. We’d love to help your HVAC company get—and stay—social. Call us today.