How To Assess Your Marketing Options
Here are three rules of thumb for assessing your marketing options.
Build on Your Believers
Your typical customer deserves the lion's share of your marketing effort. That may sound obvious, but plenty of small businesses run aground casting about for any customers they can find while never establishing a reputation with one loyal group. Targeting is the difference between marketing as expense and marketing as investment.
I once had a client who received a great review in a local newspaper. He wanted to mail reprints to 100,000 "likely prospects" who had never heard of his company. I eventually talked him out of wasting what would have been $70,000 chasing those phantom customers.
Instead, we pasted excerpts from the review all over his electronic communications to past clients and known prospects, and we posted a link to the article on his Web site. Meantime, everyone in the company was encouraged to share the "good news" (and the link) with all their contacts. This strategy put the article in front of 100,000 people at a fraction of the cost of that broad snail-mail blast. Better yet, we could more easily measure the response rate on our targeted campaign.
The same focused approach goes for marketing to other businesses. For example, do you define decision makers versus order-takers within each target company? Both are useful to cultivate, but they require different approaches if you want to get the highest return on each marketing dollar.
Only Tackle What You Can Manage
You don't have to embrace every marketing fad in the book to look au courant to your customers. Yes, electronic marketing tools are very powerful -- but only if they're kept up to date.
Blogging is a great example. Blogs are cheap to set up, but they take huge effort to update on a consistent basis. Manage a blog poorly, and you will disappoint your customers. If you are in the business of offering sage advice (say, on insurance, financial planning or accounting), a blog makes sense and could be your main marketing tool. If you are in manufacturing, more traditional forms of customer service may suffice to keep clients engaged and feeling valued.
Social networks are another increasingly popular tool. But these, too, require a fair amount of administration. Would those hours and dollars actually boost awareness and, ultimately, revenues? For many small companies, the answer is no.
In making these calculations, remember that you also have to allot enough resources to spruce up your outgoing electronic communication. All prospects expect to interact with sellers and advisers online these days -- make sure they admire the cut of your digital jib.
Take All Vendor Advice With a Boulder of Salt
There are literally thousands of marketing agencies out there that buy media, optimize your Web site so it can be found more easily by Google and Yahoo! and promise to bring you "better quality leads," among other services. Keep track of these shops, but tune out their blandishments. Focus instead on establishing a rigorous marketing plan, complete with a set of firm priorities. That way, by the time you invite vendors to pitch their wares, you control the conversation by drilling down on what you need, not what they are selling.
Remember: Your plan should dictate the solution. The reverse is a recipe for failure.
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