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On one level it would seem correct that your good work should simply be enough. After all that's where you put in your time and spend the majority of your effort. Certainly, in good economic times this strategy has more merit than during tough economic times. In fact during robust periods, many businesses simply live off repeat business from existing clients coupled with the occasional referrals. However, simply relying on word of mouth for all one's new business invariably results in the "feast or famine" business cycles that so many small business owners are painfully aware of.

So why is there such a reluctance to market one's services? Why do so many small business owners embrace marketing only as a last ditch solution, and then quickly abandon their marketing plans once referrals and word of mouth once again return?

A large part of the problem is that when faced with implementing a marketing program, many small business owners focus on activities rather than systems. For example, a marketing activity might include investing in promotional items, or sending out a postcard or hiring an appointment setting firm to do some cold calling. While there's nothing inherently wrong with any of those activities, they generally do not produce the desired results that one hopes for. The key to getting the phone to ring with eager customers is to think about what needs to occur before and after the marketing activity.

Let's take postcards as an example. These are a time-tested method for generating new prospects. However most small business owners focus far too heavily on the look and image of the card, and pay scant attention to which list they will mail the cards to, or what the call-to-action is. These two items are far more important to the success of a postcard mailing campaign than whether the font is in one size vs. another, or whether the predominate color is red or blue. As the late great directly mail guru Gary Halbert once observed, "If you have extra money to spend on a campaign, invest more money in the quality of the list that you are mailing to."

Of equal importance to the list, is the call-to-action. This means, what do you want people to do once they get the card? There are all sorts of options people have once they get done reading your postcard. Unfortunately only one or two of them are what you really want. So the question becomes, what is the best call to action?

What we have found after 17 years of testing, is that you want the offer to be as easy for someone to accept as humanly possible. This means it needs to be very risk free. That is the precise reason why a call to action of "Please call us for a free consultation or free estimate" does not work particularly well. People are assuming that if they call they will not really get a free consultation, but rather be subjected to a rather aggressive sales pitch. Thus your call to action needs to address this concern.

In the days before websites, a very successful call to action was for someone to call a 1-800 number for more information. The copy on the postcard always pointed out that this was a "recorded" message, thus alleviating the concern that someone was going to try to sell you something the moment you called. Nowadays the easiest approach is to direct people to a page on your website. That page, as I've discussed in other articles, is specifically designed to encourage visitors to give you their contact information in exchange for receiving a free report or article that offers some helpful information about the problem they are facing.

Thus an effective postcard marketing effort depends upon what takes place before the mailing occurs (determining the quality of the list) and what occurs immediately afterwards (determining what the call to action should be and where you want them to go for further information.) While this type of marketing requires a bit more planning and thought, the results will be far greater. That's why small business owners who are successful at getting new business despite the current economic conditions, focus their efforts on developing marketing systems, rather than relying on a single activity.