I spent the last two weeks of October in my spiritual home: Jamaica.
Don’t laugh. I’m serious.
Sue and I were married in Jamaica almost twenty-two years ago and I’ve visited there more than I’ve been to any other country. Strangely (for a Yorkshire man) I do feel really at home whenever I’m there and I have a strong affinity with the spirit and vibe of the island.
It really is “irie”.
Of course, the cultural icon of Jamaica is the late, great Bob Marley. Now there was a man who knew all about rhythm. If he’d had his own business, I feel sure he would have had no problems getting a steady flow of the right customers coming through his door.
I’ve talked often about the rhythmic acquisition of customers and I maintain that it is the single biggest challenge facing most business owners in this country right now (although many of them may not perceive it as such – because they don’t understand it properly).
Your rhythm will be different depending on what sort of business you have. If you’re running a restaurant with 50 covers a night then your rhythm is 50 customers a day.
If you’re a beauty salon with scope for 20 appointments a day, then your rhythm is 20 customers a day. If you’re an MOT garage with 108 MOT/service slots a week, then that’s your rhythm.
The beat might be different but there’s a consistent rhythm in all successful businesses in each of these sectors.
Problem is, right now, your rhythm isn’t constant. It’s not predictable. Not consistent. It’s uneven.
In many businesses, there is no rhythm to their acquisition of customers all. They lurch from famine to feast; from a cacophony of noise to a cathedral of silence.
And that’s not a place you want to be. There’s a beauty in a nice steady rhythm. Fast or slow, it doesn’t matter, ‘cause when that beat becomes predictable, life gets a whole lot easier.
That’s what the rhythmic acquisition of customers is all about. It’s when you’ve got your marketing systems set up to such an extent that there is a consistent, predictable flow of the right numbers of the right customers coming into your business every day, every week, every month.
And it’s not a pipe dream. It’s absolutely doable for every single business whose owner is reading this article now. It’s not even all that difficult, in truth, but it requires the right thought.
Too many business owners don’t think of their marketing as a system. They run one-off campaigns or initiatives that stop and don’t repeat.
They might have a leaflet that works really well but they don’t send it again next month or find other parts of town that they could drop it in alternative weeks or months to keep that steady consistent flow – that rhythm – continuing.
They duck in and out of AdWords, depending on the cash that they’ve got available and, as a result, their returns are significantly diminished.
If they do send direct mail out to existing customers, it’s done on a sporadic basis. No pattern. No rhythm.
Just think how different your life would be next year if you had just 12 different marketing pillars, each beating out a steady rhythm, each contributing new customers, each week or each month. Think how easy that is to administer and do compared to the ad-hoc, knee jerk, famine/feast approach that you’re taking right now.
Think how easy it is to manage the work that your marketing apprentice is doing when their job is simply to beat the drum that you’ve provided for them.
As you’re starting to do your planning for 2016, as you’re beginning to formulate the goals and targets for yourself and your business next year, please, please, please give some thought and focus to establishing your rhythm. When you’ve got it, oh boy do you know it – and the difference it makes is profound.
It really is all about your rhythm baby. How’s your beat?
That’s the final word.
