Marketing Your Business Better

The Importance of Marketing

Marketing is not just advertising or selling. Many companies loosely use the word marketing for any online endeavors or when they need to do graphic designs (for advertisement purposes) or to sell a product or service. Marketing is more complicated than that. A marketer is a business person who strategizes on how to get your company to be more recognizable, to earn a profit, and to help you GROW. If you have a marketing person, use their expertise and start growing your business. 

We all know it is now recession and many companies are cutting back on labor, and especially in the marketing department. But that is actually the worst thing one can do, as marketing should be invested even further. When your competition is cutting back on marketing, you should be investing, because recession doesn’t last forever. When the economy turns around again, which it soon will, you got the leg up because you started on your new marketing initiative before. Studies have shown that when you invest in marketing during recession, you can see a return of up to 39% higher once recession is over than companies who have cut cost in the marketing department.

What are Different Ways of Marketing Your Company?

There are many cost efficient ways of marketing your company, starting with social media networks like setting up an interactive website, Facebook, Twitter, and blogs, etc. They are often free or for a very low fee, get you started.

Marketing online is first way you can start because it means low cost. Instead of printing expensive brochures in colours, you can upload them to your website. It also means you network of potential customers increase ten-folds. You can also spend less time and energy answering questions that could have been on your website. Information is now readily available to customers at the tips of their fingers. First you don’t have to pay for the printing of the brochures. Second, you don’t need to mail them to your customers, which can get costly. Third, people don’t need to come to you at your convenient office hours – they can go on your website 24/7.

Marketing a product or service is about giving what your customers needs, not what you tell them what they need. You should be marketing where your customers are, and right now, your customers are most likely using the Internet. How do I know this? The average person is on the Internet almost 90 hours a week! Online banking has been on the rise with young and old using it, on average individuals visiting their online banking site at least 3 times a month. Over four million Canadians are on Facebook actively, and about five million people using Twitter. If your customers are online, where should you be? Online.

But just having an online website may not be enough. You see so many companies having their company online, and still not are successful. You have to drive demand from your customer, and you have to use every form of relevant media to you. Word of mouth (viral marketing) can be derived utilizing online contests, youtube, Twitter, Facebook etc. Companies have even set up forums in their websites for customers to post thoughts, suggestions and even random off topics. What I am suggesting to you is not just the new social media, but rather it is about INTERACTIVITY between you and your customer.

I am not suggesting you rely just on the new technology, but they should be in conjunction with traditional marketing too. Good old customer service and maintaining the level of customer service is important too.

Acquiring Potential New Clients

This is where it gets expensive. The theory of maintaining your current customers is more economical than acquiring new customers is true. It is always easier to sell more to your current customers than to find new ones. I wish wireless companies would get a hint! Did you ever notice, it is always better and cheaper for you as a consumer, to sign up a new 3-year contract than to renew your current plan? When you get a hardware upgrade, you have to pay the retail price, but getting that same phone as a new customer is cheaper or often free! I guess they didn’t get the memo about this business acumen.

So maybe at this point you have tapped out your current customers, and there is always value in gaining more new customers. But how do you do that? Direct marketing. No, direct marketing is not door-to-door. Direct marketing is about interacting with your customers and to find prospects. Often direct marketing is known as the mailings you get. Getting a 3% response rate is considered successful in the industry.

You can rent lists based on criterion you set out for. You can find these lists from a broker who has lists. So lets do an example:

You are an insurance company and want home owners to buy insurance from you. How do you get lists? Well you may want to rent lists from Home Magazine. Subscribers for Home Magazine most likely have homes and looking to improve their space, and subscribers of this magazine’s demographic is generally earning a higher income. Aren’t these characteristics favourable to an insurance company?

If you have in your mind the ideal customer, study their BEHAVIOUR. Their behaviour indicates if they would purchase something from you. You always want to code your direct mailing materials to get an idea how successful you have been in a certain geographic area. Traditional marketing always studied only based on demographic, psychographic and geographic, but often forget those characteristics are not enough to predict customer’s behavior. Rather you have to study behavior because it will get you a more accurate indication how likely they will respond to your marketing efforts.