Dentists have a challenge when it comes to marketing. They can have signs, ads, and everything else all over the place, but if your teeth don’t hurt, you will ignore those ads. In other words, much of their marketing is “wasted” because they can’t target only those with toothaches.

The same is true of all small business owners. We don’t know exactly who wants/ needs our services. But as Seth Godin writes, “Figure out a cost-effective way to be there. A way to gently be in my face so that when my toothache shows up (in whatever form that takes) you’re the obvious choice.”

In other words, we almost need to be omnipresent– we need to be everywhere. Then when need the product or service offered by your company, you are easy to find.

Godin also recommends offering products or services that don’t require pain for the customer to take action. Fortunately for many businesses, this is easy to accomplish. But we still need that top-of-the-mind awareness.

Market early, market late, market often. If we are always in front of the consumer, we’ll be in front of him when he needs us. Or, as Godin puts it, “There are toothache marketers in just about every industry. Realizing it is the first step to dealing with it.”

Marketing is as much about timing as it is anything. You might have the best marketing piece in the world, but if it reaches your target customer at the wrong time, he won’t respond. Godin discusses this in another blog post—Are they ready to listen?

Years ago he had written a book on political activism. He took 20,000 copies of the book to a large rally in Washington, and managed to sell 1 book. As he put it, the activists weren’t there to shop, they were there to march.

Similar things also happen when we market our small business. For example, if we are marketing exterior products in the middle of winter, potential customers probably won’t be listening. If your marketing piece reaches the customer the day after he has purchased the product you are selling, he probably won’t be listening.

We can control some aspects of the timing of our marketing, but there are other aspects that are uncontrollable. But this does not mean that our marketing is a huge crap shoot. Even when our marketing is ill-timed, it may still be effective.

I’ve had customers keep a marketing piece for years—I believe the record was almost 10 years! Knowing that someday she would need our services, she held on to a postcard for nearly a decade. Now that’s what I call shelf life!

Sometimes customers simply aren’t ready to listen. But if your marketing piece captures their eye, they might hold on to it until they are ready to do so. And if they don’t, you need to keep on talking to them. Sometimes they aren’t ready to listen. Sometimes they can’t hear you… yet.

Growing vegetables is a hobby that I enjoy. There is nothing like a vine ripened tomato or fresh cucumbers. While the effort involved is certainly more demanding than simply going to the grocery store, the rewards make it well worth it.

Watching seeds sprout from the ground and grow into something productive–not to mention tasty–requires careful nurturing. The young plants must be watered, pruned, and fertilized. It takes months before the seeds that we planted begin to bear fruit. And this is often the case with marketing our painting business.

It can be easy to expect immediate results from our marketing. It can be tempting to grow impatient when the ad we ran last week hasn’t filled our store this week. But as with growing vegetables, sometimes we have to plant seeds and nurture them for some time before they produce results.

Marketing often requires patience. While experts disagree on the exact number, a consumer must see our ad multiple times before it begins to register. He needs many exposures before he begins to take notice.

In addition, consumers are not necessarily in the market for our product or service at the exact moment we run an ad. Just because we are speaking doesn’t mean that they are listening.

When growing vegetables, we do not know ahead of time which seeds will sprout and become productive. We must plant many more seeds than we actually need, because we know that some simply will not produce. The same is true of marketing–one seed will not produce a bountiful harvest.

Every winter contractor forums are besieged with contractors wondering how to generate leads. Unfortunately, by the time they ask the question it is probably too late to do much about it. The time to think about winter leads is not in the middle of the winter, but in the summer and the fall.

Fortunately, we can predict when winter will occur—it happens the same time every year. So there is really no excuse for not preparing for winter.

There are many things that you can do to get ready for winter. Some contractors save money during the rest of the year. They plan to have little work when the weather turns cold, and they use that time for other activities, like catching up on my blog.

If you haven’t saved money, or prefer to keep working, you should have a marketing plan to generate the leads that you will need. That marketing should start well before your leads run dry. Effective (and relatively inexpensive) marketing that should be considered includes retention marketing and a sign promotion.

Depending on your location and when winter actually begins to impact your work, you could also pre-sell interior work now. Offering a discount for customers who delay interior work until the winter can be a win-win—the customer saves some money and you enter the winter with jobs on the books.

For ideas on marketing, click here.