The TV was on the other night and I was really getting into Gordon Ramsay’s Nightmare Kitchens. Now if you’ve never seen this show, don’t worry because it was my first time too! In short, Gordon’s mission is to take an underperforming restaurant and turn it into a kick-butt money making machine. And he does this through sharing his expertise in the area of cooking, managing and most importantly, marketing the business.In the episode I was watching, he totally turned a business around in just a few days by revamping the menu and attracting a more affluent crowd that spent on average 5 times more money compared to their previous client base. Pretty impressive stuff. The interesting thing though is that after he'd left the restaurant to run on its own for a few months, he gave them a surprise visit only to discover that the number of customers had dropped dramatically and the business was in serious trouble. And when Gordon approached the owner of the business, his reason for the poor performance was that he didn't feel that there was a market out there for what they had to offer. Sound familiar? But it gets even better. Because when the owner was asked, “well have you been sticking to the marketing campaign we set up?”, his reply was a big fat NO!
And this is what I want to talk to you about. There is a big marketing disease going on in businesses which I like to call “Binge Marketing”. And the reason why it’s called this is because businesses have a tendency to market their business for more clients only when they’re in trouble. This is where you see marketing budgets go through the roof because they're doing whatever they can to get more clients in. It’s a really terrible business habit to have because it puts the business’s cash flow under massive pressure, it creates a roller-coaster effect on your income and causes a whole heap of uncertainty. And this is exactly what the restaurant was experiencing. The only anti-dote for “Binge Marketing” is to Always Be Marketing your business.
Now you might be thinking, “oh but I get too busy at times and its impossible for me to do!” I get that. But also know that when you set up marketing systems that work on auto pilot, you don’t need to be doing any hands on work to market your business. And there are plenty of ways of doing this, within both the online and offline arena of marketing with the likes of automated email campaigns, setting up strategic alliances and creating landing pages. Not to mention, there are now plenty of super cost effective ways to consistently generate leads online, particularly through pay per click marketing such as Google Adwords and Facebook Ads.
The bottom line is that if you do marketing sometimes, you get clients sometimes. But if you do marketing all the time, you get clients all the time. And wouldn’t you prefer to have a consistent stream of clients rather than random amounts only when you’re absolutely desperate? This is why it’s so important to invest your time and effort into creating marketing systems for your business that works for you all the time regardless of any of your extra effort. And the best time to do this is now.
So take the lesson from the restaurant I mentioned earlier and don’t get caught in the disease of “Binge Marketing”. Because as you know, it only works sometimes and if you’re truly in business to make big things happen, you can’t rely on luck to create your business success. Remember, always be marketing your business.
