Even Hawaii Needs Marketing…

I love Hawaii, although I haven’t been in several years.  You would think that a place that’s like Heaven on Earth would have a steady stream of tourists visiting just to get away from the economic gloom and doom we keep hearing about on this side of the ocean.  It’s interesting that even the State of Hawaii has to market themselves.  They compete on a global basis to get their name out there and remind people what they’re missing.  They recently had to compete with all the other states to get Disney Productions to choose them for the new Johnny Depp, Pirates of the Caribbean movie to be released in 2011 – and they succeeded!

If you think you can sit back and wait on your wonderful customers to send you all the business you need, you might want to rethink that strategy…  That’s what I call building a business based on “customer gratitude”, and while that may seem like it’s working for a while, over the long haul you’re putting the health and well being of your business outside of your control by expecting this to be the driving factor for your future income.  If this sounds like your main marketing strategy, chances are over the last two years you’ve discovered that when your customers decide to economize and spend less, it doesn’t work as planned.

Not long ago the construction business I co-own with my husband, was so busy that we were sure we couldn’t handle any more work for months, maybe even years.  So, we stopped our normal marketing practices like direct mail.  Hindsight, as they say, is always 20/20.  When we started hearing how bad the economy was going to be in the near future and decided it was time to get busy and start our marketing campaigns up again, it was about six months too late.  Consequently, it took several months to get back on track and get our phone to ring with potential customers.  I’m glad to say we’re still working, and some other contractors out there aren’t.   They’re probably waiting on those customer referrals to start rolling in…

The moral to this story is, don’t wait on just one marketing strategy to work for you.  Make sure you’re utilizing all of them including, direct mail, social networking, face-to-face networking, website strategies, and more.

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