Starting Small Business Promotional CampaignsWritten by Joy Gendusa
So you’re starting a small business. You figured out what you wanted to sell or do and went out and got it all set up, had your DBA framed and on wall and now all you need is for someone to buy your product or use your service. Right? How are you going to go about getting your public to know you even exist? Promote! Promote! Promote! Well that all sounds simple, but say you’re a financial specialist, a boat builder or llama farmer. They probably didn’t teach basic principles of starting small business promotional campaigns in boat-builders’ school. So what do you need to know, and how do you go about it? Let’s start with “Basic Principles” of promotion: What is Promotion? Promotion is making something known and well thought of. Why do you promote? The purpose of promotion is to bring in more business than worst of your mistakes and weakest points of your organization can drive away. Always try to bring in as much business as you can, and you will always win. Never allow yours or other people’s objections like “our shipping department just isn’t fast enough” or “the box supplies are getting low”, to slow you down. Just keep everyone so busy that they won’t even have time to worry about it. How do you promote? There are more ways than you would ever think. Have you ever heard someone say, “I never promote and I am always busy” OR “I don’t have to promote, all my business comes from word-of-mouth”? They may not be aware of how they’re doing it, but I promise you they are promoting somewhere. Maybe they just go around telling everyone they talk to, that they don’t promote. (Sound funny? It’s still promoting.) Maybe their larger-than-life running water faucet in front of their store attracts so much attention that they don’t need to do anything else. Well here are some ideas you can do “knowingly” to drive in business. •Greeting your customers with a smile is a great place to start. •Calling your customers after they have had a chance to use your product is a good way to promote that you care about their experience with your organization. It can also create an opportunity to make more sales. •A neatly packaged product, shipping label on straight, promotes that you take pride in what you do. •Always keep up-to-date brochures or catalogs about your business in your reception area for people to see and take with them. •If you have customers coming into your business, make sure they are greeted pleasantly, professionally, and immediately. Anything that makes company or its employees better thought of or more well known is promotion. But how do you go about promoting to masses?
| | There’s More to Marketing ROI (return on investment) Than Meets the EyeWritten by Joy Gendusa
All too often people look at marketing ROI in terms of response rate: in other words, “I sent out 10,000 pieces of direct mail and only got 39 responses which is terrible.” This is wrong think. When it comes to marketing ROI, you have to realize that term means Return On Investment and return is measured in dollars (or your local currency). Let’s say you spend $2,000 to get out a bulk mailing of 5,000 pieces and you get 10 calls as a result. Doesn’t look like much. But of these 10 calls you close 6 and get immediate sales of $12,000. That’s marketing ROI! And that’s not even taking into account future sales to those 6 new customers. It could add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars. The same simple mathematics apply to any other marketing efforts: radio ads, press releases or articles in magazines, print ads, yellow pages, web site, etc. Obviously you need to keep track of response from each marketing campaign you do so that you can weed out unsuccessful campaigns and strengthen successful ones. Case in point:Jeff Lee, CFO of a very successful consulting company, Measurable Solutions, has adopted a successful small business marketing strategy based on direct mail marketing. Key elements are mailing out a newspaper and full color postcards. The design is done in house and printing and mailing is done by a specialized postcard printing company. In his own words... “We get our best response from mailing out a newspaper and back it up with postcards. Depends on postcards. Some postcards have pulled better than others.
|
