There are many ways of doing this, but advertising and promotion in some form is at the heart of this effort.
Before we run that next ad, determine our next promotion, create a social media campaign, or begin anything that is designed to drive people to our website, our showroom, our inbox, or our phones, we need to ask ourselves two very simple questions.
It’s not that we don’t need more exposure and more potential clients – we do. The issue is a matter of timing and flow. The two questions are (1) how much more business do we need at the moment (or the short term) and (2) how prepared are we to handle additional business over and above what we currently are getting through the normal course of business and campaigns already in use?
It’s easy to become so focused on creating more potential clients and customers for ourselves that we actually invest in ads and other promotions that we don’t really need to using because we are just able to service the business we already have, or we feel that it never hurts to have a few extra people to work with to account for people who change their mind about moving forward with a project.
This is understandable, but sales leads do have a shelf life, and they are perishable – especially when it comes to making aging in place renovations for people. There is a certain window of time when people need the work done, when they are receptive to making a decision about moving forward with the work, when they have the money to invest in the project, and beyond which they will have had the work done by someone else or decided just to do without any changes even though they were indicated or needed.
There are many ways to make a name for ourselves in the marketplace and to create an awareness of what we offer. We can engage in direct marketing and advertising where we purchase online and print ads. We can maintain a social media presence through content and paid advertising. We can produce webinars and public programs to promote what we are doing. We can rely on word-of-mouth referrals from satisfied clients.
How we decide to proceed with driving our message into the marketplace to produce new customers and clients is a factor of how much business we need to make our revenue projections and keep ourselves and our strategic partners busy. This will change at various times of the year depending on how much work we already have scheduled or committed to do, the number of proposals or estimates we have outstanding that could materialize, and our current workload at that time.
We just need to evaluate how much more new business we need to generate and just exactly how prepared we are to complete anything else we might sell. It’s a balancing act, but we don’t want to be in a position where we have produced so much interest in our services that we can’t work with all of the people who have reached out to us for help.