The answer to that question is “all the time”. Marketing is not something you can turn on and off. Marketing also needs to be viewed as an investment, not an expense. Turning on marketing only when business gets slow puts you in a viscous cycle. Although you could spend money on paid advertising to hasten your visibility, it is better to build visibility organically.
Effective small business marketing is not an activity to be done only when things get quiet, but is a process that should be constantly and consistently happening in your business, making your business more visible to those looking for your products and services.

It gives you a clear plan to stick to and something to measure against your results. If you have a plan in place to meet a certain objective, and that objective wasn’t met, then the activity would need to be analysed to make sure it was the right one for that objective.

Without a written marketing plan, your business is making decisions on the fly. This results in disjointed marketing efforts, wasting time and resources on activities that may or may not work for your business. When your plan is written down, you become more focused. Committing your goals, strategies and activities to a written document is the only way to avoid losing sight of what we want to achieve – turning our ideas into proven reality.

Social Media Marketing (SMM) is a general term used to describe promoting your business on any of the variety of online channels that enable users to create and share content and participate in conversations in public and private communities. There are literally hundreds of social media channels to choose from such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube and Pinterest.

Benefits of continuous marketing:

• You build awareness and brand differentiation for your business by being visible to your prospects and clients;
• You establish a solid reputation for your business by marketing your expertise through articles and blogging;
• You distinguish your business from the “competition” by staying visible and promoting your expertise;
• You can evaluate your marketing efforts by the results you are seeing in your business.

If they work, keep doing them; if they don’t work try something else.