These days, running a business through word of mouth just isn’t enough anymore. Long gone are the days when an entire business strives on some solid reputation and loyal customers’ word of mouth.

In running your business, having a rock-solid reputation is definitely a must.  This is where you base your word of mouth advertising. While it’s true that word of mouth can take you places, relying on it though is just not enough these days. Certainly, working on referrals will continue to rake in more customers; but you’re missing out on one important key to becoming a successful business: constant promotion. Somewhere out there, there are potential customers who need your products or services. The thing is, these people don’t even know your business exists.

With the economy struggling, your customers’ budgets are slowly being pushed to the limit. Each person is looking to stretch the value of his or her dollar; and the customers who you thought were loyal are also looking for businesses that can give them the lowest rate with the same services or products as yours.  The main concern here is that if you rely on this customer to provide you with referrals; all of that can be gone with the loss of this one client.

With the struggling economy in mind, you always need to put customer attrition into the equation of running your business. A loss of a single customer will mean a lot to a company that runs solely on its reputation and word-of-mouth. You now need to invest on attracting more customers to try to negate the effect of customer attrition in your business.

In comes marketing your business. If you work based on word-of-mouth referrals, then it’s time to rethink your strategy. You might want to find out how customers view your products and/or services first, then capitalize on that. You can do this by having your customers answer surveys or just by asking them what they think of your business. You can also ask them to give testimonials on how your product or services was able to help them. Given this customer data, you can then use it as the focal point of your marketing strategy. You want to get the positive experiences of your customers out there in the market, so that potential customers can get to see them.

Putting all things into consideration, marketing then should be part of your daily business operations. With the environment now, you need more visibility to earn you a bigger foothold in your niche. Having this visibility will protect you from customer attrition, and get you more customers.  You just need to find out the positive points in your business, from a customer’s perspective and work your marketing strategy from there.