Marketing is one area that most business owners and even consultants either overuse or underuse it. Like most things in life, there has to be a balance. In other words, there has to be an organized approach to marketing.
I have outlined 2 specific methods you can use right away to streamline your marketing. These methods can be used either for your own organization or for your client’s organization.
#1 Write down your objectives
First and foremost you need to identify what objectives your marketing program needs to accomplish. Are you trying to increase sales, increase traffic or do you just want people to know about your company and it’s services?
On most occasions, clients would say I want to increase sales. At that point in time, you need to identify the fastest way to increase sales. And, the fastest way to increase sales is not always a TV commercial or a newspaper ad or your google pay-per-clicks. I am not saying these specific advertising vehicles will not increase your sales, all I am saying is “analyze if they will accomplish the set objectives before implementing them.”
Sometimes, sales force training or revamping your sales force and trying to sell more to existing customers might get you better results.
#2 Try doing a few things consistently rather than trying to do too much
Sometimes, frequency might be more important than reach. I see so many marketers trying too much with their marketing campaigns. They try every social media site that exists, they advertise on google and 10 other search engines, they advertise on every magazine they can lay their hands on and very soon they’ve expensed their marketing budget on 10, 15 or 20 different places.
Initially, it might be a good idea to experiment with different media but sooner or later you need to narrow down your focus.
For example, instead of advertising on 3 different radio stations, focus on 1 radio station. The advantage with this is, it probably takes people to hear your advertising message 2 or 3 times before they even understand it. And, not to mention the negotiating power you might have with this radio station because of your bigger budget.
This does not mean you advertise on a radio station with 10 listeners. Of course, you need a little bit of reach as well. If you can put your message across 10 times to 100,000 people or once to 1 million people, you should choose the former – 10 times to 100,000 people rather than once to 1 million people.
For my business, I only advertise on google and one other place. I only focus on google because majority of web traffic comes from google. So I just focus on google. I experimented with other search engines but the results weren’t great and I eventually narrowed down to google.
And, I am only active on two social media sites twitter and facebook.
Let me know what you thought about this article in the comments section below.