It’s ALL Marketing

You can’t separate the color of your carpet from your front desk clerk from your Facebook posts from your TV spot. It’s ALL marketing and the consumers are using ALL of it to determine whether or not they’re going to do business with you.

Many business owners that we work with think marketing and advertising are the same thing, but they are significantly different. Advertising is just marketing that you pay for. But marketing… marketing is a whole plethora of things.

The culmination of marketing is how your potential customers talk about you when you’re not around. Are they talking about what great service you had or how the stain in the middle of your lobby made your building look dirty? Are they talking about that amazing Facebook post you put our or your employees that they heard complaining while they were waiting to be served? Are they telling their friends that they paid a lot of money for your product, but it was worth it or are they talking about how they couldn’t find your business because your sign blew down two years ago, but you didn’t think it was worth fixing because your business comes from word of mouth?

You see, you can’t get away from people telling stories about your business (actually… you can… but being obscure is probably the other thing worse than being criticized). If people are going to tell stories, what story are you giving them to tell?

In the end, you don’t get to decide what story they tell, but know that every single touch point they have with your business will lead them to perceive something about you. What are you customers perceiving about you from:

• Your logo

• Your last Instagram post

• Your sidewalk

• Your sign

• Your clothes

• Your employees’ attitudes

• Your Google reviews

• Your response to your Google reviews

It’s important to know because in the end… it’s ALL marketing.