Great customer service is great advertising

As a small business marketing consultant, the question I hear most often is, “What’s the best, most cost-effective marketing?”

Many people think that social media is the answer. True, on the surface, social media is a low investment. There’s no fee for setting up a Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter account. However, once those accounts are live, someone has to actually write something to go on those platforms. And keep writing. And they also need to consistently find ways to reach out to other people on those networks in a way that makes them actually want to friend, connect to, or retweet your messages. So that requires content, that’s relevant to your business and valuable and engaging to the reader. Creating good content requires energy, some smarts, and a good bit of research.

In other words, social media isn’t free. To do it well, requires time and lots of it, which makes it not as cost effective as many people hope. In fact, do it badly and social media can end up costing you a lot more than you bargained for. Just ask the Television and Motion Picture Academy who got called out in the media for their tweet when Robin Williams died.

So perhaps the most inexpensive marketing is electronic newsletters or email?

Those can be pretty affordable since there’s no printing and postage associated. You just have the cost of time in creating the newsletter and perhaps the monthly fees from mailing platforms like icontact or Constant Contact or Mailchimp. While emails are low cost, they can have pretty low conversion rates—depending on the industry you’re in (Mailchimp has a table that shows the open and click rates of email blasts by industry). So, while they are economical, they’re not always effective.

So what then is the most cost-effective marketing for small businesses?

The best, most sure-fire, works-every-time, won’t-cost-you-a-penny-more-than-you’re- already-spending marketing isn’t marketing at all. It’s good customer service.

Do the right thing by your customer. Treat them the way you’d want to be treated. Deliver on time and on budget. Promise less and deliver more.

I can give my clients an array of marketing solutions across many channels, but the one thing I cannot solve for them is bad customer service. Inevitably, the return on their marketing investment gets diluted if customers are consistently leaving bad reviews on review sites like Yelp and City Search. (I will cover how to deal with bad reviews in my next post.).

If the product or service you are delivering is sub standard, no amount of marketing is going to help your business long term. In fact, it could accelerate your failure. Eventually, the one-star reviews are going to outnumber the fives and the bad word of mouth will take hold.

It costs a lot more to gain a new customer than to keep the one you already have. The business that gives great customer service 100 percent of the time has the most cost-effective marketing and most likely, doesn’t need to hire someone like me. So, if you want to fire your marketing team or pay less for marketing, deliver amazing customer service.

Marilyn Heywood Paige is the principal of Paige Integrated Marketing in Broomfield. You can reach her at MHP@PaigeIntegrated.com.

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