No Matter What, Keep Marketing!

As many of you have probably heard, one of the biggest mistakes very small businesses make, when revenue is down, is to stop spending money on marketing and advertising.  The mistake is obvious to an outsider because of the clear connection between sales and marketing.  However, when you are in the trenches of the very small business, and you are running out of cash, you focus on the basic needs of survival: payroll, vendors, rent, and keeping the lights on. However, I propose that marketing IS a basic need for survival.  


How are you going to pay for any of the other basic needs if your phone stops ringing?  I have referenced Stephen Covey's model called The Management Matrix, from his book First Things First, in other posts, and it applies here as well.  Marketing falls in the Important, Not Urgent quadrant, so when we are in crisis mode, it gets cut.  I am not suggesting that marketing shifts to the Important/Urgent quadrant, I am suggesting that you focus on Quadrant 2 during a crisis.  Marketing takes planning and forethought.  You can sometimes get your printer and marketing company to get your flyer out in a few days notice if it is simple and small, but is it going to be effective?  It is important to take time to develop your marketing plan, budget and materials.  
Find more information at The Business Forum; Cut Anything but your Marketing Budget.

Also, there are a multitude of ways to market your business for free!  Here is a link for 10 easy ways to market your company for free.  10 Ways To Market For Free

I won't write about all of them here, you can read them, but I would like to look at how you can use facebook and other social media to promote your business.
I finally got on the bandwagon with Facebook, and within 2 weeks I went from 30 followers to 109!  It required just a little effort on my part and it increased my exposure 3 fold.  Facebook is nice because it is easy to update with pictures, links, videos, and information for your people to enjoy.  I haven't figured out what really grabs people yet, but it seems that people are mostly visual.  They like shiny things, like bass fish.  They are all looking for that new shiny thing.  
A guy walked in my store one day and presented me with his service as a videographer.  (Check out REVisuals.com)  He was new to the industry, so his prices were very competitive, which made it affordable for me to hire him.  We shot 3 videos of our work, and I have posted them on Facebook, and my web site.  His videos were very high quality and professionally produced.  If you are broke, you probably couldn't afford to do something like this.  However, if you have a phone, it most likely has a decent video camera built into it.  Your production may not have the quality of a pro, but your personality, information and product or service will be out there for the world to see.  Remember, people are visual.  There is a reason Youtube is such a mega-success.  If something doesn't work, try something else.  You never know what people like to see until you experiment.  And if you are doing the videos your self, for free, you have nothing to lose but some time. Your time is never wasted on such projects, because you can always learn from your experience.
Here is an example of a video we've done: