Marketing, PR and Communications. Three areas of your business where you need to be bang on. The foundations of a relationship you build with potential consumers, they captivate, communicate and care for your clients. They can also be pretty damaging to your business if you get them wrong so it’s worth considering the long term effect of any strategy before you kick off.

One company which thought they had stumbled across a cool marketing whizz was Casa Sanchez in California. They popped a sign in their window offering free lunch for life to anyone who tattooed it’s logo on their body. We guess it seemed like a fun idea at the time and maybe Casa Sanchez thought that one or two people may be crazy enough to do this. Unfortunately 40 newly inked customers came through their doors. At this point the restaurant decided to get the accountants involved and realised if all 40 customers took up the offer and ate lunch every day for the next 50 years, it would cost the company $5.8 million dollars. This is a great case of a simple and free idea for them, ending up costing a fortune. And a lesson, to never underestimate what people will do for a free lunch.

Marketing will make or break you as a business. Finding a good digital marketing company is a good place to start. Don’t be led by them when it comes to budget, you lead when it comes to the figures. Tell them what you can afford and then hand the reins over. You need to run any ideas they come up with past your accountants. Get someone to crunch the numbers and tell you if there is enough potential gain to make the spend worthwhile.

You could go it alone in some areas. Social media is a good place to start but before you put your company online you do need to understand a few of the pitfalls. Having your business on Twitter means you give the world direct access to you when things go wrong. A great example is the recent mistake made by a British flower company who failed to deliver their product on Valentine’s Day. Straight away their twitter was full of angry customers all airing their issues. Unfortunately the company had a very poor strategy for dealing with this. There were no apologies made, no resolutions and they came across as simply not caring. The truth is they just had no idea how to deal with the situation. If you take a look at Interflora who also had a few issues on Valentine’s Day, you will see that their social media team openly apologised, made very quick resolutions and everyone was happy. The lesson to learn here is that ownership is important when you are on the world stage. The ability to say “Ah, we have made an error. This is how we are going to fix it for you” can turn a bad situation into a good one.

Best advice when it comes to your marketing and communications strategy? Leave it to the professionals.