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The world is full of whacky products and services. And many a business owner has come to us looking to crack a market with their next best idea.

So when creating a marketing strategy I always ask three questions.

  • Your market: Who are they? Be specific.  Narrow is down.  You can’t sell to “everyone”.
  • Your message: What problem are you solving? What’s the pain? What’s the gain?
  • The media: Can you get in front of them? And at what cost?

We’ve spoken about selecting your market here. We’ll cover how to craft your message in another article.

Today we’ll focus on media or how you’ll get your message in front of a prospect, what it’ll cost and your ROI.

Broadly speaking there are three forms of advertising.

  • Search
  • Display
  • Direct Out Reach

We’re all familiar with Search advertising.

You have a problem.  You’re looking for a solution.  There may or may not be a real sense of urgency.

You’ve spilt red wine on your carpet and you need a carpet cleaner right now.  You search in Google, find someone and call.

Or you’re looking for places to go for a weekend away.  In the old days you pulled out the Yellow Pages.  Now you type keywords into Google and see what comes up and do your research.

A client installs and maintains fire systems for commercial, shopping centres and strata buildings. Jobs range from a few thousand dollars at the low end to hundreds of thousands.

Using Google search advertising he gets as much profitable business as he can handle.  He even got asked to tender for new fire systems for the Sydney Harbour Bridge – all off an ad in Google.

Display advertising works indirectly.  Advertisements in newspapers, magazines, ads that appear while browsing pages on the web including Facebook and TV are all forms of indirect advertising.

Ads are designed to catch your attention and get you to take action.  But you weren’t actively looking for what they’re spruiking until you saw the ad.

Right now whether you sell B2B or B2C products or services, Facebook can be a very effective advertising platform due to its ability to specifically target markets based on a huge range of factors from location to interests.

We’re implementing FB adverting in the Financial Planning and hobbyists area to name a couple of niches.

Direct Out Reach is where you actively target a prospect with a marketing message.  Could be via direct physical mail or FAX (yes, this still works extremely well if targeted correctly), email, SMS, twitter or Facebook and LinkedIn messages.

Another client targets Principals in private high schools. We instituted a highly targeted direct marketing multi-touch, approach which helped him sign a number of very high value, multi-year deals.

Using a combination of methods will always give you a much better result.

One of the most effective additions to the mix is Remarketing/Retargeting.

Remarketing is where you show prospects that have visited your website additional online ads that remind them of what you’re promoting.

I’m sure you’ve experienced examples of this.  Go to a large retailer like Officeworks or Bing Lee, search for a product and then notice how many of these product ads show up as you browse the web on unrelated pages.

The art is in how to show ads in the right combination and frequency encouraging prospects to take the next step in your marketing funnel.  Done right, they are very low cost and are highly effective.

You’ll get the best results using a combination of direct, indirect and remarketing.

Want to know more?  Call us.

A couple of additional points to note:

Know your maths!

All marketing costs money.  If your cost per conversion is higher than your selling price, you’ll go backwards fast.  Therefore it’s imperative you know your conversion rate and take steps to improve it as well as upsell.

Once is never enough.

No matter what you’re selling you must, repeat must, get prospects into your marketing funnel allowing you to consistently follow them up with educational material and offers.

All marketing is communication.  The more you communication, the more you will ultimately sell.  In Woody Allen’s words, “90% of success is just showing up”.

Need help putting  together a coherent marketing strategy which will deliver you more clients?  Call Rashid on 0414 913 334 for a strategy session.

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