Marketing Methods Summary 1

You may wonder if I’m somewhat biased on the methods of marketing I’ve chosen to discuss first, but let’s face it, my entire business is “marketing” – I have access to every service and product available in the world of marketing; I have relationships and affiliations that enable me to help a business with every aspect involved in marketing. I chose these particular methods simply because of their simplicity and economical benefits. You absolutely can sink a lot of dollars into a combined effort with these methods, however, you can also utilize this particular blend of marketing methods on a very limited budget.

1. Print advertising – consistency is the first priority, regardless of where you choose to run your print ads, don’t make the mistake of ‘running one to see how it goes’ (a comment I hear frequently). To be perfectly honest, if you can’t afford to plan for a consistent campaign, don’t waste your money, one ad isn’t going to have any long term, noticeable impact for you.
   
   At the same time, keep in mind that “consistency” doesn’t have to mean “expensive”. You don’t need the biggest, flashiest ad in the most expensive publication to gain print media exposure.
   
   You need a message that will get your customers attention, placed somewhere they are likely to hang-out. (Finding out where your customers “hang-out”, in terms of media, is another tracking topic that I’ll come back to in another article.) Then, from the potential places your customers hang-out, price AND value shop.   One publication may offer a cheaper “cash-out-of-pocket” option, but your cost per household could be double or triple what another publications pricing would be because of total circulation.  Is your business better suited to a very specific demographic? Or do your customers come from all walks of life at all ages?
   
   Remember you are looking to “cross-market”, so find out if the publications you are considering provide current, online versions in addition to their print versions and are they free or subscription based? Do they offer other products that they’ll package for you? Find out if they offer value-add-on deals or come up with your own and ask them if they’ll do it. For example, you could always ask “If I run a certain size ad with you for a set duration, will you throw in a classified ad, or a business directory ad for the same time frame at no extra cost?” If you don’t ask, you don’t know.  Most businesses first ask “What discount can you give me?” but really, if you think about it, what has a stronger impact on your business promotion? Saving 10% on the price of your ad, or getting a free business directory listing so that you appear more than once to your customers in the same edition?
   
2. Print materials – the trick here is to work with print materials that can have multiple uses, to be heads up on paper selection and don’t make assumptions. For example, through our suppliers our glossy business cards are actually less expensive than the matte cards, not what you would typically expect.
   
   Depending on your business you could have a brochure that also acts as an order form or an inspection form or maybe all three.
   
   In some cases sacrificing a little bit on the paper quality in order to print with a smaller company that will accommodate small batches of printing can be a benefit from two angles 1) less cash out of pocket for you; 2) you have the opportunity to make adjustments to your materials as you test them out with the market, rather than getting stuck with hundreds or thousands of something that really isn’t working for you.
   
3. Targeted Direct Mail – Canada Post will allow you to break down your mail outs to cover Houses, Apartments, Farms and Businesses (or any combination of these four) as well as separating out specific postal codes. So before you jump in to do your mail out, research the areas you want to reach and be selective with where you are sending out to. If you’re not a B2B then there probably isn’t much point in paying the extra premium pricing that Canada Post charges to mail to the business addresses. The biggest key with Canada Post direct mail outs is to do your research. Most of the staff at Canada Post across the country are not trained in marketing, they are not equipped to provide you with sound marketing advice or even thorough knowledge of the regions you are looking into.

So now, how do you tie these components together in cross-marketing? Well, on the surface simply doing them simultaneously is technically “cross-marketing”, but it’s not “effective” cross-marketing.  To cross-market effectively you want to tie your marketing messages together so that they are all working towards the same goal. Another topic I will cover in more detail later is the focus of your message, but for now, suffice it to say “pick one focus”.

Too often businesses try to cover as much ground and information as they possible can all at once.  But look at it this way, this is the fourth email you have received from me with marketing articles, you have read over 2,500 words just in the main article portions.  If I had sent you over 2,500 words all at once would there have been as much chance that you would have read all of it? Probably not.  Your customers feel the same way when they see something about your business.  Don’t try to overwhelm them with everything all at once.  Plan specific campaigns, with a specific focus and tie all your marketing efforts together into that focus.  You don’t want to just hit them with it once, which is why cross-marketing is so effective. But you also don’t want to keep running the same thing indefinitely.  So each campaign needs to have a start and finish point.  Campaign marketing is also much easier track progress with – basically for the duration of the campaign, and for several months after the campaign, did your sales increase in your area of focus? (Watch for a future article on what to do if a specific campaign doesn't increase your sales.)

My apologies that this one was a bit on the longer side, it simply didn’t have a strong or logical break point to split it into two parts.  Tomorrow I’ve got a shorter summary on the other three methods and a nice piece on the full integration of all six methods.