If you own a small business, you are well acquainted with marketing, and depending on your persuasion, you either love it or hate it. Regardless of your feelings, positive or negative, marketing is an important part of your overall business strategy. Market well and you’ll likely be doing it for a long time. Fail to do it well and eventually your business will be no more.
Reams of information have been produced on the subject of marketing. This overwhelm can cause even the most inquisitive home inspector to throw in the towel. In the marketing arena, like many other areas in the home inspection world, we’re vulnerable to the reality of information overload. Too little time to consume too much data can lead the frustrated inspector to simply give up.
We know what we know and that’s all we’ll ever know.
Even though surrendering to the lure of the couch would be easier, it makes good sense for us to put forth the effort necessary to become familiar with the essential ideas of marketing. Like lots of things in life, basic marketing can be explained by a simple rule of three, in this case, the three groups we need to consider when promoting our business.
It’s easy enough to put these groups into three different buckets: those people who will always hire us, those people who will never hire us, and all the people in-between those two extremes.
If we’re lucky enough to have people in the first bucket, those that will hire us, then we’ve had some level of success with our marketing. Obviously, something’s working for us. Similarly to the way that we occasionally check in with our most cherished friends to maintain those bonds, we’ve got to put in the work to preserve those business relationships. Making sure that our cherished customers know that they’re appreciated is one of the best ways to continue those relationships.
The people at the other end of the spectrum, those that will never hire us, need not warrant a minute of our time. They’re never going to hire us, so why waste precious resources on them? Until the point in time where our business becomes so successful that we’ve run out of people in the other two buckets and we’ve got to work to convert those non-believers, any time spent on this bucket is like flushing money down the toilet.
Our focus should be on the potential customers in that middle bucket, those people who really haven’t yet decided if they’re going to hire us. This is where we make or break our success. It’s from this group that we find all the people who populate our first bucket: our clients. The middle is the source of our business and where we’ve got to focus all our energy.
Jump into the middle of things.
Ben Stein
To separate things a bit further, this middle bucket can be chopped into thirds as well: those people most likely to use our services, those least likely to, and everyone else. Ideally, most of our time and resources should be spent on the third of the bucket most likely to use our services, as that’s where we’ll get the biggest bang for our marketing dollar.
So then, the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question is: How do we find out who these people are and how do we reach them?
Unfortunately, every business owner’s situation is different and various factors influence the success and failure of our marketing plans. No matter what all those marketing gurus tell us, there is no one-size-fits-all, magic bullet of marketing. There are just too many variables involved for a silver bullet marketing plan to exist.
Where we are in our inspection career, the areas we market to, the number of resources we have to allocate to our marketing plan, our level of knowledge and experience, and our tenacity all play an important role in the success of our marketing plans and, eventually, our business.
The important thing to remember is that marketing is a process. It takes time to figure out what works best for our specific situation. Trail and error are an integral part of the evolution of our procedures. Learning what to do and what not to do are all part of the growth of our marketing plan and our business.
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Thanks, Joe
