On December 17, 1903, Orville Wright made aviation history when he piloted the first flight of a heavier-than-air powered and controlled aircraft that he and his brother, Wilbur, had built. He traveled 40 yards in 12 seconds. The rest of that day, Orville and Wilbur took turns flying their airplane, which they called the Wright Flyer. After its fourth and longest flight (Wilbur flew it nearly the length of three football fields in just under one minute), the Wright Flyer was damaged when a wind gust flipped it. The brothers had it sent back to their shop in Dayton, Ohio.

After you have started a business, what keeps it going? You may have hatched a groundbreaking idea that launched your business. You may have had startup success. What comes next? If you don’t market for sustainability, you will leave yourself open to a crash. Let’s take a look at some marketing strategies to keep your business moving forward.

How do you market to your customers? These are people who have become convinced to buy your brand. What do you need to do to retain them, and beyond that, to become brand-specific, loyal customers? Have you given them an incentive to return for another purchase? It is hard to get first time customers. Once they decide to buy your brand, what are you doing to keep them? Typically, a customer will come back for more if four factors of their first purchase are viewed as a positive experience. First, did your quality live up to the billing? Second, was it priced right? Third, did you deliver it on time? Fourth, and maybe most important, did they have a positive customer service experience with the people they encountered? If the answer to those four questions is yes, then you have set up retention marketing to succeed. Give your customers a loyalty card and an incentive program and they will buy from you again and again. But if you find any of these four areas were not up to par in their eyes, you need to do your best to repair the damage and market the changes you have made back to your customers. This calls for a bit of vulnerability on your part, but it may sustain your business in the long run.

We don’t often think of flawed quality, bad pricing, slow delivery and poor customer service as marketing problems, but they are. They reflect displeasure with your brand. It is the job of marketing to guard your brand’s reputation and to put it in a favorable light with consumers. If your brand has taken a hit, it is the job of marketing to help tell the story of how you are fixing what is wrong and rebuilding your brand.

There is something else to remember when you are marketing for retention. Old things can go stale after a time. Everything has a beginning and an end in business. There is a shelf life to good ideas. If you are finding that the attitudes of your customers are changing, it may be time to do something new to catch their attention once again. Rebranding is one idea. A fresh look and name can help reinvigorate a tired brand. But it may also be time to expand your brand to include other items that would be valuable to your customers.

The Wright Flyer was a novel idea in 1903. It didn’t take long to go out of style. In fact, no one ever flew that aircraft again after the fourth flight of the day on December 19, 1903. Other planes were developed and built that could sustain longer flights. How sustainable is your business? Your marketing should be helping you to stay aloft.