Co-ordinate Your Marketing
During the course of our marketing consultations with small business owners, we find that they have usually tried lots of different advertising media, which in and of itself is not a bad thing.
But what tends to happen is that it is difficult for them to keep track of what they have done, and what works, or more importantly, what doesn’t.
And this is purely because they are too busy running their business to get bogged down in it all.
It is all too easy to say “yes” to every advertising salesperson that comes along, but often this is without a central strategy around what message you are trying to communicate to the people in your market, especially if you do not sell commodities, but rather more complex, expensive or obscure products or services.
And this is where you can have a half dozen or more advertising methods on the go, with little (if any) co-ordination between them.
This is confusing and potentially extremely costly to your business.
We prefer to use a “cook a chicken and serve it four ways” approach to marketing.
What does this mean?
Simply, that it is most cost effective and logical to start small and test your message to market.
Figure out which aspects of your marketing fly like a bird, and conversely, which flop like a dead fish.
Then take your successful marketing messages and content, and use them across a number of different media. For example, you might tweak and submit a high response generating long copy ad or advertorial to a relevant local newspaper or magazine as an information article.
You could take the same piece of content, tag it with the appropriate keywords and post it to the blog roll on your website.
The same punchy piece of copy could be used as part of a free report, or in an email marketing series.
If the headline is particularly powerful, it could form the basis of a Yellow Pages ad or a classified ad.
The point is, to start small, test for feedback, use the data you get back from the market to develop your message, and when you hit upon a winning formula, ramp up your efforts and use it as much as you can, for maximum reach and leverage.
You may be thinking that this all sounds like an awful lot of work.
We won’t lie, it does take a reasonable amount of planning and co-ordination to pull it all together.
But that’s where we come into the picture.
What’s more, having been small business owners ourselves, we know that there is probably no ‘money tree’ to fund extravagant marketing that is not designed to bring more customers and sales into your business.
We understand that “just getting your logo out there” is a meaningless exercise in throwing money down the drain.
