Your greatest marketing cost is reaching your customers and prospects.

by | Jan 29, 2012 | Blog | 0 comments

WHERE ARE YOU SAYING IT?

Where are you communicating with your customers and prospects? Where can you reach them most cost effectively? What are they reading, listening to and watching?

You need to invest wisely and and measure your results by capturing responses to as many of your communication initiatives as possible.

Here are a few rules of thumb:

  1. Budget (Marketing as a rule of thumb is 10% of Sales)
  2. Media or cost of reaching the customer is about 75% of the Total Marketing Budget
  3. Reach (most small businesses try to talk with too many prospects / customers)
  4. Frequency (most small businesses do not repeat their message frequently enough) 100 customer x 10 times is better than 1,000 customers x 1 
  5. Continuity is important (most small businesses do not pursue the dialog for long enough! Rather than appear in 3 editions of the magazine or newspaper with a Full Page advertisement choose to appear in 6 editions with a half page advertisement. The same applies to digital media) 
  6. Media should drive the message E.g.. Do not make the mistake of producing 5,000 Brochures, first and then ask how will you get them into the hands of your customers and prospects!
  7. Just because you can get a great deal from the media (of any type) it doesn’t mean it is right for your business. Here are just a few examples of a lack of media planning:
  • Why is 2 Office Medical Centre on TV? Especially when there was no point of difference or area of specialty mentioned during the ads.
  • Why is a “general brand ad” for a Shopping Center on Radio? Again, as the advertisement on the radio would have reached the entire metropolitan area, this shopping center gave no reason why someone other than those in the immediate geographic catchment would bother getting in their cars and traveling substantial distances.
  • Why is a large B2B industrial company on Radio? Have they exhausted all other possibilities? I doubt it. Online Marketing, Social Media, Direct Mail, and the list goes on.
These media choices may have all seemed like great ideas to these small and sometimes large business owners, but that doesn’t make them right. These media choices may have been affordable but were still wrong!
In the 3 examples above each of these businesses has a very specific target market. This specificity is due to either their geographic location or their niche B2B Audience.
Their ‘mass media’ choice will not only produce massive amounts of wastage but is unlikely to deliver the best marketing return on their investment.
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