AB: All-Round Nice Guy

Marketing your business is both a dark art, and an inspired work - that is, even with the best of intentions, marketing is a lot of trial and error, and plenty of hit and miss. Sometimes you make gains with bold new initiatives, but other times you’re just one of the many messages that radiates daily from the business world.

To use just *one more* cliché, the important point here is not to put all your eggs into the one basket - spreading around different marketing strategies is just the same theory as in the investment world: spread your risk, and make a secure return overall.

One of the best ways to spread your marketing message is to cover both extremes: highly targeted, under-your-nose type things, as well as far-reaching, low cost-per-view type things.

One of the best highly targeted marketing tools is a direct mailout - a brochure/catalog/catalogue/cattle dog - call it what you will, it’s either read voraciously, or used as a bin liner by millions daily.

And at the other end of the spectrum, one of the best ways to mass market is via the humble web site - build it and they will come… perhaps…?

It’s fitting that web sites without any changing content are back-handedly referred to as ‘brochureware’ in the industry, since both paper-based brochures and virtual brochures have both the ability to communicate strong marketing messages about your business, as well as ability to bore your customers to tears.

Since we’re aiming for ’strong messages’ here, and not for ‘bored to tears’, the following will show you the strengths and weaknesses of both types of brochure, when to use which one, and how to use *both* online and offline marketing to make good investments in your small business marketing.

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WHEN TO USE A DIRECT MAILER / BROCHURE (AND NOT TO USE A WEB SITE):

- When you have a finite customer list who are the backbone of your business - the 20% of customers that make up 80% of your sales.
- When you are highly locality-based, and your customers all come from a known radius of your business.
- When your customers need the broadest overview of your products or services in the fastest possible time - they can quickly skim through a catalog, or peruse your range at their leisure.

WHEN TO USE A WEB SITE (AND NOT TO USE A DIRECT MAILER / BROCHURE):

- When your customer base is extremely large, moreso if your customers are not high-repeat customers.
- When your business is mobile, or is not dependent on a physical location for a customer base.
- When your customers need to do ‘deep research’ on your business, your products or your services. A web site doesn’t put any sales pressure on your customers, so if you have complex offerings, or tech specs, or simply a range of options to compare, then a web site allows your customers to research and make selections at their own speed.

WHEN TO USE BOTH A DIRECT MAILER *AND* A WEB SITE:

- When you have a business that’s neither locality based nor widespread nor fully mobile - a regional business that’s aimed at a wide range of customers, but those customers will be ‘keepers’ - strong return customers once you find them. In this case, a web site assists in giving your customers background info on your business, inviting them to make contact, and then a follow up brochure, mailed directly, provides clear and concise information about your business. The benefit here is that you can then survive with a smallish web site (aimed primarily at establishing first contact), plus a smallish run of printed brochures (saving you expense of mass mailing, scattergun style).

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The Protect Your Marketing Investments:

Given that you know a little more about some marketing mainstays, the story doesn’t end there: that ‘build it and they will come’ line from intro riff is just that - a riff - and not to be taken seriously by any means.

If you want your marketing investments to grow, you have to feed them regularly.

In the case of a business web site, three important tasks are:

1) Regular updates. Nothing stops return visitors to your site than pages last refreshed in 2006 or earlier. It’s the real world equivalent of faded posters on your walls. Not classy. Fresh stories, and fresh customer testimonials, too.
2) Set up some online advertising. Yes, Google is the easiest to get started with, you set daily budgets for as high or as low an amount as you wish. The small traffic you’ll get from your small ad spend is nice, but the real benefit is the knowledge of what your customers are searching for when they find you.
3) Review your web stats. A visitor to your site only leaves a few small anonymous footprints, but from that, there are extensive analysis tools (free!) to be able to determine what works on your site, year-on-year trends, and what do focus on in future features and content.

To protect your direct mail investments, three important tasks are:

1) Update your business system/customer relationship management (CRM) system regularly. If you need to address your mailers, you can’t afford to have more than a few percent be returned due to wrong addresses. Keep your system up to date with contact addresses and touch points. I’ve heard of one business that put contacts into their database, then rips up any business card they’ve received - to make sure they don’t leave them lying around, un-entered into their CRM system. Hard core, but seriously smart - if you have some contacts’ details in one system, and more ’somewhere on my desk’, then you’ll have heavy work to do before you can do a direct mailout.
2) Keep a library of marketing collateral. Keep records of your clients, testimonials from key clients, photos of your work, press clippings - everything you do, file it away with a view to using it for your next marketing message.
3) Have your branding on file in every file format, in every colour space. It’s surprising how many businesses don’t have master copies of their logos and business branding - aim to have your logos and wordmarks in ‘master’ form, hi-res (print ready) jpeg, and lo-res (web ready) jpegs - and in your full colours, in greyscale (for newspapers) and also in black only (for faxes).

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OK - so we’ve covered some popular ends of the marketing spectrum, but there are many other options for your business in either above or below ‘the line’ (mass marketing / direct marketing, respectively).

I’ll cover more options in coming articles, but I think I’ve given you enough of a headache for now! (Panadol supplied on request).

AB out