People I talk with often assume that the marketing we recommend will be expensive. After all, they reason, only the big boys have the money to do really effective marketing. And only by spending a fortune can you generate great sales.
Wrong!
Your marketing should be cheap. Very cheap. And it should be cheap because of one- (1) simple rule you need to follow. The rule is this:
You have to target your market.
Marketing shouldn’t be a scattergun approach, with you delivering your unwanted message to a disinterested audience.
Your marketing efforts should be as precise as possible because you have identified your market and approached them.
Here’s an example: With a plant nursery client of ours, we have found that about 72% of customers are from within a 5km radius (and that’s the stats for the competition as well). The customer profile is women aged 40+, working part-time, read the local daily newspaper on Wednesday and Saturday, listen to the local radio station in the mornings before 8 a.m.
They also have web access, watch gardening shows on TV and generally first hear of the Nursery by seeing the sign out the front.
Now that we have identified our target market, we can make an offer to a highly interested audience.
Here’s what we might do:
- Make the sign bigger out the front
- Letterbox drops within a 5-10km radius
- Take newspaper ads on Wednesday and Saturday
- Take radio ads in the 7 – 8 a.m time slot
- Take TV ads during the gardening shows
That’s targeted marketing – and that should be cost effective (and therefore cheap).
One quick point here. A good argument might be that we shouldn’t do the above marketing as that market segment already knows us. Maybe we should be letterbox dropping in the areas around our competitors, maybe we should be trying to grow market share by and maybe we should be attacking a different demographic.
Good thinking. You should incorporate a bit of both into your marketing strategy and measure, measure, measure the results.
Cheers
