You finally get that seat in that brand-new rental car adjusted to fit you; now you have to delete those last fourteen phones from the memory so you can connect yours. You adjust the mirrors as best you can and head for the exit, handing over your driver’s license on the way out. Freedom.

Hey Siri, coffee shop near me, and you select the nearest bougie coffee roaster, hoping they make a coffee that will kick Starbucks’s ass, then follow the directions to your caffeinated heaven.

But yesterday you didn’t need to look for a coffee shop because you were home. In your hometown, it was somebody else arriving, trying to find your local caffeine IV drip hotspot.

It’s hard for us business owners to flip our brains into customer mode and think like the customer. If it were easy, we wouldn’t need marketing consultants to help us read the label on the outside of the bottle we find ourselves swimming in on a regular basis. What I’m trying to get you to understand is that there is only so much search in a given day for what you do.

Every day, there is a limit to the number of prospects searching for what you provide. This is the total search in your market for that day. And the sad reality is you can only get your fair share. You can’t buy it all; Google won’t let you. If you buy local services leads from Google, then I hope you understand there is a fairness component that controls whose ads get shown. This is why, if you set your budget to fifty thousand a day, you don’t see any more leads.

AdWords works similarly. Ok, it’s an auction for the top spot, but you’ll never own it 100% of the time, and it wouldn’t be cost-effective to try.

There comes a day when you hit the limit. There’s nothing more you can buy. So what do you do then?

This is when many people change SEO companies, praying that it will get them more traffic, only to pour their money into the black hole of hope. Smarter companies figure out that having only a reactive marketing system is what’s holding them back. Reactive in that you are reacting to the people who raised their hand today and said I need a coffee spot near me.

What you need is a proactive marketing system that is creating future customers for you. This is the part that stops many business owners in their tracks: “You mean I’m spending money now on marketing and advertising, and I can’t measure the return because I have no idea that’s what caused the prospect to call?”

Correct.

Proactive marketing makes people aware of what you do long before they ever need you. The longer you do proactive marketing, the better it works. The first year sucks because it takes at least nine months to get the flywheel turning, but every year after that it picks up speed. Short-term pain for long-term gain.

Proactive marketing is what causes customers to go directly to you and bypass the Google Tax. They either just walk in, visit your website directly, or call. They’ve already decided they are doing business with you. They don’t search.

As you walk into that bougie coffee shop and order your double espresso shot. Remember, they got your business only because you didn’t know where to go for great coffee. They were lucky their business showed up when you went looking. You might have ended up somewhere else because of Google. But do they have a proactive marketing system that reminds their local market to keep coming back for coffee?

Do you have a proactive marketing system, or are you trying to squeeze the last bit of juice from your reactive marketing?

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