“We’re a service company, only products companies really need to do marketing”. Not true. If you have anything to sell (a product or a service), you can benefit from marketing.

“We tried that before, but it doesn’t really work.” By that , people usually mean a variety of things. Could be they tried direct mail. Or an advertisement n a trade journal. Or a pretty new website. And, they might be right. Maybe it didn’t work. But, the question is, if it did or didn’t, how would they know? So few small businesses can tell you with any degree of confidence what activities are actually leading to more clients or increased retention. No wonder so much marketing activity seems ineffective – nobody’s really figured out what works and what doesn’t.

“We don’t need to do marketing. We’re small and plan to stay small.” This is the “we get enough clients already” argument. I can’t argue that. Lots of professional services firms have a steady stream of clients from their existing referral network. Growth is not for everyone. But, my argument here would be: Just because you don’t want to grow the number of partners or increase “revenues”, doesn’t mean you can’t benefit from marketing. Marketing can often be used to increase your retention rate, and improve the quality of the new clients you do take on.

I came across a great article today from RainToday titled “ When It Comes To Marketing Services: We Don’t Do Marketing ”. The reason I liked the article so much is that it describes vividly one of the common thread of discussions I have with small business owners (particularly successful professional services firms).The premise is that many small businesses don’t think they “do marketing”, or for that matter, that they need to “do marketing”.The basis for this line of argument is that service firms (such as aw firms or consulting firms) often don’t believe that marketing is really appropriate or effective for them.Here are some of the common reasons why many of these firms don’t think they need to “do marketing”: