Envisioning Success

Coordinate Your Marketing Efforts

Posted by Chris Shockley under Marketing

Unless your business is just booming, with customers fighting to get in your door, you’re faced with the task of marketing yourself constantly.

There are a lot of ways to do this such as, networking, advertising, direct mail, a website, Facebook, etc.

This article is not about the specifics of each of those, but rather a primer on a new paradigm using your direct mailer campaign in coordination with your website.

With so many avenues available to the small business owner, it’s easy to get overwhelmed with how to do each one the most effectively. That is actually the problem, each one of these often promotes itself as if by just doing “x” you can gain the customers your after, when in reality, you will find far more benefit from using one avenue of your marketing to support another.

Our Example.

Direct mail can be a very effective tool for getting your name out there, reinforcing your branding and getting some direct sales. The experts say something around 2% is an expected return on a generic direct mail effort. If direct mail didn’t work, we’d stop seeing it so we know that, at least to some extent, it is still a valuable marketing tool. The direct mail guys will tell you two things, if they’re any good, that

1) you need a good list (you want to mail to potential customers after all) and

2) you need a “call to action”. Besides that, a great headline, good colors and graphics all help of course.

Let’s focus on the call to action. What is that? Well, it’s the line that urges the reader to do something (the thing you’d like them to do of course). Call Now!, Call today, Enter and win, Buy one get one.

That’s all well and good, but you’re dealing with a one shot deal there, they either do it or they don’t and you’d never know the difference. So how can you make things better? Well, how about you make your call to action be something that exposes them to more of your marketing? Huh? Yes, make your call to action be something that directs them to your website where you can track to see how many visitors you’ve actually had and it’s a place where you can market to them even more. Something along the line of: “Enter your email into our drawing”, or “Sign up for the free eBook”, or “Enter for…”, etc.

By offering something compelling and valuable you motivate them to participate. They willingly sign up, giving you their name and email and maybe phone, and you give them something for free or entry to win the contest, etc. This gives you permission to market to them at a later time and be encouraged by the fact that they’re interested enough to want more information or product or service means you have a far better chance to get their business.

Once you have their name and email, you can follow up to make sure they got the info they were looking for, you can ask them if there is anything else that they want or need, you can tell them about the next offer. Maybe you do a monthly special or have a series of tips that you give. Whatever you do, make sure that your marketing efforts have a better chance of working by using them to support the whole.

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Chris Shockley is owner of Envision Design Solutions and has been building websites for over 12 years. He can be reached via the web: http://www.EnvisionDesignSolutions.com/