There is always a good reason to put your marketing off.
At the time of writing this, people say they’ll wait until after the election. At other times of the year, it’s after the school holidays. When spring arrives. Once Christmas is out of the way. At the start of the new financial year. When things are quieter. When things are busier.
Or simply when things calm down a bit.
The trouble is, there’s always something.
And while you’re waiting for the perfect time to start showing up again, the people who might need what you do haven’t necessarily stopped looking.
Your marketing might be on hold. Their search isn’t.
Think about what happens when you’re looking for a business yourself. Someone recommends a name, so you Google them. You see something interesting on LinkedIn and click through to their website. You search for an answer to a question and find a blog. You discover an idea on Pinterest and follow it back to the business that created it.
Your potential customers are doing exactly the same thing.
They don’t know that you’ve decided to get back into marketing your business after the election, or that you’ve had an incredibly busy few months. They don’t know you’re planning a new website or that posting on LinkedIn has been sitting on your to-do list since April.
They can only see what’s in front of them. And if what’s in front of them hasn’t been updated in months, it can create a very different impression of your business than the one you intended.
Would you assume the business was still operating?
This is the part I think we sometimes forget when we’re looking at our own marketing. We know we're busy, we know we're working with clients and we know the business is very much alive and kicking.
But someone discovering us for the first time doesn’t know any of that.
If they land on a website that hasn’t been touched for years, find a social account where the last post was six months ago or struggle to find anything recent about what the business actually does, they might start wondering whether it’s still operating.
And in most cases, they probably won’t send an email to check. They won't pick up the phone. They’ll click back and look at the next option.
That business might not be better than yours. They might simply look like they’re open.
This doesn’t mean you need to post every day
Maintaining an online presence does not mean spending your life creating content. You don't need to be on every platform, you don't need to post seven days a week and you definitely don't need to leap onto every new trend because somebody on the internet told you that you should.
What you do need is enough of a presence that when someone comes across your business, they can see that you're active, understand what you do and feel confident taking the next step.
That could be a useful blog answering a question they’ve been searching for, a LinkedIn post that shows what you know about your area of expertise, a Pinterest Pin that leads them to something useful on your website, or an email that reminds someone who has been following you for months that you’re there.
None of those things needs to happen constantly. But your marketing does need to be happening consistently enough that your business doesn't disappear from view.
Good marketing gives your business more ways to be found
This is why I’m such a fan of looking at your online presence as a whole, rather than thinking of marketing as a never-ending list of platforms that need feeding.
Your website, blog, search presence, Pinterest, social media and email can all do different jobs. Some content keeps working long after you create it. Some helps new people discover you. Some reminds existing followers that you’re there. And some gives someone the final bit of confidence they need to get in touch.
Together, they make it much easier for someone to find you, understand what you do and decide whether you're the right business for them. Importantly, they also mean your visibility doesn't depend entirely on what you happened to post this morning.
It’s less about constantly creating something new and more about building an online presence that continues to represent your business properly.
Do it yourself or get some help. Just don’t keep waiting.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with managing your own marketing. Plenty of business owners do it very well, particularly when they have a clear idea of what they want to say, where they need to show up and a realistic plan for actually getting it done.
For others, there comes a point where it makes more sense to hand some or all of it over, whether that's to someone within the business or to outside support. Neither option is automatically better. It depends on your business, your budget, your skills and, perhaps most importantly, how much time you realistically have available.
The important thing is deciding how your marketing is going to happen rather than continually deciding when you’re going to start.
Because after the election, there will be Christmas. After Christmas, there will be summer holidays and everyone will be “getting back into things”. Then Easter will roll around, followed by the end of the financial year, winter, school holidays and whatever else gives us a perfectly reasonable excuse to wait a little longer.
There will always be something.
Meanwhile, somebody is searching for what you do.
Make sure that when they find you, your business looks like it’s still in business.