What do the following things have in common: brushing your teeth, regular exercise, eating a balanced diet, paying your bills on time, cleaning your gutters, spending quality time with your spouse and kids?

Theyre all forms of regular self-care that, if you neglect them for a period of time or take the wrong approach, there will be costly negative consequences.

The same goes for marketing.

Do any of these symptoms sound familiar?

Your phone does not ring regularly with new prospects.

You dont regularly hear, Hey, Ive heard of your company!

Your sales pipeline is dry, so you go to some networking events, get some leads, then stop.

People dont respond quickly to meet or talk with you after an initial introduction through networking.

The leads you do get trickle in slowly.

You spend a lot of time looking for opportunities, but arent getting the results you want.

You cant safely project your firms income for the next 6 to 12 months.

Youre finding it hard to attract and retain top talent, even in a recently tough economy.

Relationships with clients tend to be short and one-off projects (i.e., no repeat business).

You rely heavily on one or two income streams (i.e., consulting or coaching).

Most of your eggs are in one basket (i.e., one or two major clients), and if they went away, youd be in trouble.

Youre too busy to look for more clients.

If any of these symptoms ring true for you, one of two things is probably happening. Either youre not marketing on a consistent enough basis to generate reliable results. Or youre not using the right approach to get the kind of results you want. Or both!

Consistency is Key

The American Dental Association recommends brushing your teeth at least twice a day. The USDAs food pyramid maps out a balanced approach to eating. Your mortgage company or landlord stay happy when you pay them monthly on time. Experts urge us to clean our gutters twice a year. You get the idea

Do we really follow all of these guidelines to the letter? Probably not. But within reason, people who consistently follow healthy habits over time, get better results, live younger longer, and incur less cost (financial, physical, emotional) than those who do not.

This is definitely the case with marketing for professional services. You simply cannot dabble in lousy messaging, offer an unwanted service, do occasional networking, or disappear from your target audiences radar, only to reappear when you need more work. Benign neglect and sporadic attention will get you predictable results.

Heres why: clients come to you in a very vulnerable positionthey need something from you that they cant do for themselves or dont have the expertise to solve on their own. So they need to trust that 1) you wont lead them astray, wasting their time/money; and 2) you have their best interests in mind.

How can they begin to trust you, then, if you disappear from sight, inconsistently communicate with them, or say things that they cant understand or relate to?

Taking a proactive, consistent preventative maintenance approach to marketing is the key to building trust in the marketplace.

Heres how to make marketing a healthy habit:

STEP 1: Offer what the market wants. Sounds obvious, but youd be surprised how often I see firms selling what their clients really need, they just dont know it yet. Or, this is such a worthy cause (new approach, cutting edge strategy, etc.), I just know its needed. Unless you have the PR and marketing budget to fund a major, long-term educational campaign, you cant afford to take this approach.

STEP 2: Say the right things to the right audience, at the right time, in the right way. What you say (messaging) is more important, and harder, than spreading the word. The biggest waste of time and money is to spin your wheels promoting your services when youre saying the wrong things.

STEP 3: Do some form of marketing every week, if not every day. Even if youre swimming in more work than you can handle now, you cant afford to stop promoting your services. Ever. Pick a theme for the week and just do it: prepare a talk, draft an article, network, write your monthly keep-in-touch e-newsletter, ask for testimonials, add case studies to your website, send items of interest to clients and contacts, write thank you notes, do a postcard mailer about your next talk, call an old client, write and send out a press release, provide great client service, develop a valuable freebie to give away, and so on.

Successfully marketing professional services is about establishing and sustaining trust through a consistent approach to meaningful visibility with your target audience.

Ignore this advice, and in short order youll suffer the equivalent of cavities, leaky gutters, bad credit, and an expanding waistlineand end up paying the expense of emergency surgery, instead of the smaller investment of taking a preventative approach.