I met with my financial advisor recently, and he asked me why I was doing so well in this terrible recession when other consultants were hurting for business. My answer: Marketing and Branding. I know we marketers will always say marketing works, but we are often the worst offenders. That is, we are the cobbler’s children who run shoeless in the neighborhood.
I was recently one of the cobbler’s children—okay, maybe I was wearing one shoe. At the beginning of the year, business was light and the phone was rarely ringing. I decided that I would take this lull in business activity to refresh my brand, redo my website, launch some new services, get active in social media, educate through public speaking, and expand my networks online and offline. I did all that and can happily say it worked. I am now busy with some great new branding clients with a good pipeline of new business.
It helps if you have a good product and a strong position to start with, which I do. There are many marketing and branding consultants out there who will give you a laundry list of all their services. When you walk away, it’s lucky if you remember one of them. I have positioned myself as a positioning and brand strategy expert—a focused specialty—with a differentiated JumpStart Branding™ methodology. My value proposition: rapid delivery of high-value strategies with team consensus,
The moral to this story is that when economic times get tough, don’t batten down the hatches and wait for new business to come floating by, you have to invest in marketing to make your opportunities happen. I did, and can happily say that Branding Pays. :))
