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How to be your own marketing agency

2 July 2014

Marketing agency tips from Marian Chapman works of marketing agency, Fusion Creative Marketing.

Marketing bombards us from all directions: radio and TV ads, press and magazine ads, text messages, email marketing and in the post, advertising on trucks, roadside hoardings, bus stops, posters in shop windows.

Look up and you can see promotions on balloons, look down in a supermarket and there are ads on the floor. 

Then there are the search engine ads, banners and pop ups on websites, social media communications are often thinly disguised promotions, ads in directories and inserts into publications.

The humble business card is also a form of marketing. 

It seems the only time we are not subjected to marketing is when we are asleep so maybe it’s only a matter of time before someone works out a way to stream ads into our dreams!

marketing-agency-tips

Joking aside, this all adds up to a huge amount of opportunity – potentially - but most business owners find it actually adds up to a huge amount of confusion and find it is easier to do nothing rather than risk wasting money by doing the wrong thing.

So, how do you work out what marketing will work for your business?

Why, who, when and where

The starting point is to think about what you need to achieve for your business, for example that could be to sell more to existing customers or to find new customers or both. That’s the why. 

Then determine who your best prospects are, try to develop a feel for them as people including what they might read, look at, listen to. You could ask existing customers.

Hot prospects

When is relatively easy – your business may have in-built seasonality or quiet periods to fill. Plan your marketing activity accordingly.  

Overlay this part of your plan with regular communications to existing customers they are hot prospects. Keep in touch with them. You could offer this important group of people special deals, discounts or offers to help encourage them to be loyal to your brand.

The work you’ve done to determine who to aim your marketing at will give you a good indication of where. Often a combination of channels works well, e.g emailing followed up with a mailshot will get your brand known and sales coming in. Or maybe a PR campaign with regular Tweets will reach your target audience.

Test and learn

At this stage you will have to accept that nothing is guaranteed so a period of test and learn is fine (so long as you set up tracking methods so you do learn). Then you can review what happened, and do more of the things that worked and less of the things that didn’t.

Some activity is easier to measure, with pay per click advertising (eg Google Adwords) for example you can access all kinds of metrics and Google Analytics is a good tool to measure website traffic. Magazine and newspaper ads can be measured by adding a media code (unique to each title and insertion) or – if relevant for your business – a coupon is a good way of knowing exactly where the business came from. 

At the very least make sure anyone who answers the phone in your business asks and records where the caller heard about you. 

Don’t try to test too much at the same time otherwise you won’t be able to gauge what works best. 

If you have a plan - and stick to it - over time (sometimes a short time) it will deliver return on investment and help you meet your business goals.

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