Marketing isn’t advertising – spend your $5k wisely

Yesterday a number of people tweeted out an article by Tony Eades on Anthill Online. It was titled “How to spend a Marketing Budget of $5000”. I read it and to be honest the song lyrics “let’s do the time warp again” seemed to echo around my head. It annoyed me.

Technically all of the five top things to do were doable for under the budget, but not all of them combined. However, what caught me the most was the key issue business owners, marketing staff and others need to realise. Marketing is not advertising, and vice versa.

Had the article been titled “How to spend an Advertising Budget of $5000” it would have felt more appropriate to me.

Why?

Marketing is about going out and understanding your potential audience, establishing what exactly is required in the marketplace for what you have or intend to offer, and understanding the buying factors, considerations and product requirements that would enable you to be competitive in the market. And a whole lot more. Even for small business owners it is not just about advertising, and frankly SMEs need to know that more than anyone. They cannot afford to waste dollars, any dollars.

Marketing is about shaping your product / service offering to that market, and ultimately about delivering on the promise. It means you have to understand how you deliver right through to how your invoices are presented; your support teams engage with customers and solve issues, product flaws, feedback mechanisms – the whole kit and caboodle.

Well it does where I come from.

This in my humble opinion is why so much money is wasted in both offline and online ‘advertising’.

The five items proposed were:

Build Your Online Business, Direct Mail Campaign, Refresh your Brand, Targeted Print Advertising and Higher Impact Signage.

In order:

Websites.

There are still a lot of businesses without websites, but not all necessarily need to jump into one. No, I am not being a heretic, but just getting a website because everyone has one is not the right advice either. If you are going to spend money try and do it well, not just because the world tells you that you should. Plenty of websites have been built for $5k or more and are useless. (more later)

Direct Mail can be highly effective, if it is a targeted, measurable response-activating device. There is a lot of ‘junk mail’ that lands in post boxes and local business doorsteps. Much goes in the bin at the post office. You need to do testing samples, short runs and figure out exactly what converts best. You need an offer and a call to action that is sustainable and deliverable. Otherwise, it is as effective as a spam email campaign. You need to know what the prospects want before you make them the offer. How many can you get for your budget? At a conversion rate of 1 – 3 – 5 % will that even cover the costs of the campaign?

Refresh your logo (it was called refresh your brand). A brand is not a logo. Nor is your brochure. If anything, a brand speaks to people and engages them in a way that matters to them. Think Coke, think Virgin, think your local fish and chip shop. If you rave about the local cafe, they may have an average logo and no brochure or packaged product per se, but you probably get their brand message much more from the way they deliver to you than from advertising materials. Not to say having a decent image isn’t worthwhile, but you could burn $2000 without blinking for a logo which you then have to print. No sales yet.

Targeted Print Advertising. I liked the word Targeted, that is exactly what marketing is about. Trade mags can be great, but if you are going to advertise be clear to whom and what you are offering. Booking 3 months worth of ads you cannot back out of that generate no calls is going to burn you quickly and you will not trust a potentially good medium again.

Higher Impact signage. Hard to disagree with this, but only if yours is highly flawed, damaged or very tired. ROI (return on investment is the catch cry). How much in real sales or even better gross profit can you attribute to any of the above? Will you be able to determine the signage has actually generated sales?

So what should you do?

Start asking questions.

Ask every customer in your shop or business why they buy from you. No seriously, ask them. Buy them a coffee and ask them. You might even enjoy it. Call them or every time they place an order ask why. Write it down. A simple spreadsheet (hand drawn if you like) will give you a scorecard of responses.

If you have a website already, use Kampyle or Get Satisfaction. Either free or from $120 per month, you can get ongoing qualified useful feedback (good and bad) from people visiting your virtual site.

But go outside your office and ask others.

If you want to connect with businesses and people in a 5 km radius then leave your office door. Start visiting other businesses. Start asking and talking to people.

NOTE> I didn’t say selling or pitching.

Start asking what they need, what matters to them, what is happening in their business. This costs only your time but you will find real answers.

Your existing customers are the richest source of information you can get. If you really are not doing great, they will tell you either directly or in what they don’t say. Listen. Don’t be offended. You started this because you wanted to get better or sell more or build your business.

As a side note, this is the fundamentals of online social engagement; frankly, it is not much different to offline. Ask good questions, listen, think, and don’t be offended. You asked remember!

Now go back to your business and summarise it all.

This might be a new way of packaging your offering – now look at how you advertise it. Direct Mail, email, on your site, or other forms of advertising. Maybe your signage on your business now has a great new message to tell about what your community said matters most.

Maybe you have fixed a service delivery problem, which means your existing customers will start to rave about your business to others. What did that cost you? Only time and effort.

You know your business best on the inside but your prospects and customers know how it really works for them.

Ultimately, that is what matters. Maybe you have ended up with the wrong customers for what you want to offer, but now you know and can fix that.

Now you have material to change your website, or to build a new website from.

If you can see a real opportunity to convert a $5000 investment into an ongoing sales and support tool there is suddenly plenty of reasons to do it.

How about attending some networking functions? Meet other business people. Costs, < $70 for a breakfast or lunch depending on venue and type. This will not only get you energised and thinking not just about any issues you have but open your mind to ideas on how others represent themselves. You will learn from talking with other business people. You will start creating relationships. Remember, referral marketing is as powerful as any other.

What type of referrals can your existing customers offer you? What special discount or offer could you provide for $5000 across your customer base that would provide a much more qualified, highly targeted referral to your business?

A $50 offer across 100 customers can quite possibly get you a much bigger return than a Sling Mud on the wall approach.

The point of this blog is not to necessarily highlight every opportunity that exists to lift your business performance, more to identify that you need to understand your audience much better and speak to them.

So much talk these days is about Social Media (electronic versions that is) but in reality whether online or offline it is really about talking and listening to the people that matter most to you. If you are in business then that is either your existing customers or your prospective customers.

Listen to them. Hear what they say. Go back with a conversation that appeals to them and your $5000 will be well spent and get rewards.

Spend you money anyway you like, but i f you want real value for your money learn to market not just to advertise!

Well that is what I reckon anyway.

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