Downtime marketing is a concept I teach any business I consult with to utilize. All businesses will have downtime, slow time, or off-time. These blocks of time are usually wasted, my goal is to put them to good use.
One of the first excuses I get for not using social media is “But I don’t have the time”. That’s BS, you have the same 24 hours all businesses do. Most aren’t making efficient use of it. Time is our only non-replenishable resource and it’s also the most squandered. We audit our money to see where it goes but we don’t audit our time.
I’m going to use a computer store as an example here. When I first started working with this business, we found that between 9-9:30am they rarely had any clients in the store.The same went for 12-12:30 and 3:30-4pm. So they would spend that time vacuuming, cleaning the coffee maker, washing windows, etc. These are all necessary tasks but so is bringing customers in the door. We decided to take ten minutes of that time and dedicate it to using social media. The idea is that, while you wouldn’t throw together a newspaper ad or a TV commercial in ten minutes, that’s plenty of time to throw out a couple of tweets, update your Facebook status, check your Google Alerts, and answer any questions on your social networks. It was time they could reach out to past customers, start relationships with new ones, or find other businesses to affiliate themselves with.
Sure a clean store is great but when you don’t have enough customers coming in, does vacuuming three times a day seem like the best use of your time? You need to get the word out there about what you have to offer. Even the best product or service might as well not exist if no one knows about it.
Another client had told me that they didn’t have time for social media, yet they could sit for 6 hours every day in front of the computer and watch the stock ticker.
We all have time between client calls. Between meetings. Between appointments. While we’re waiting for that pot of coffee to brew.
Many businesses get in the vicious marketing cycle. They don’t have enough customers, so they fire up the marketing machine. When their funnel is full, they stop marketing. They empty the funnel, realize they don’t have any clients, and begin the cycle again.
Unless your business is at full capacity all the time, you need to be marketing consistently. Make use of your downtime and turn it into full time. Once you have a constant, steady stream of customers and you run at full capacity for a while, your satisfied customers will do a lot of the marketing for you. Then you can decide how best to grow your business. That’s a good problem to have. Much better than wondering when your next customer will walk in the door.
The idea is to break the cycle, lessen the ups and downs, turn the feast or famine cycle into one long meal. A steady stream of customers will give you a sense of security and stop that roller coaster ride feeling.
Now go do a time audit. Figure out where your time is being used inefficiently and make better use of it. Your business will thank me.
