Marketing on a Budget

A few years ago I interviewed well respected business coach Rick Wittman from Jump Business Development. Rick has an excellent knowledge in sales and marketing and as we chatted, shared some valuable insights on how to best use your marketing budget. This interview should prove to be extremely useful for many businesses.

How do your clients get the most out of their marketing budget?

Our clients continually do things that remind me of the power of doing the basic stuff right, and I have seen two recent classically simple strategies that have extended the life of their marketing material from the average "five-minutes-to-a-month, then bin it" to a guaranteed couple of months, or a year - or more!

How did they achieve this?

In the first instance, our client simply added a community Events & Entertainment Calendar for the coming two months to his bi-monthly newsletter. The Calendar is a comprehensive list of events of key interest to his target clientele, thus maximising the chance of his message being hosted on the fridge door or some similarly central point, for the next two or three months, and creating the potential for prospective clients to see and request one.

In the second instance, our wholesaler client set out to create the "catalogue to end all catalogues" for his industry. It was a labour intensive and expensive exercise but two strategies made it a killer!

What two strategies made this catalogue such a success?

First, he incorporated 12 tables of hard-to-find but commonly needed industry reference information that would see his catalogue used as a quick and simple single point of reference for this data. Given the timeless nature of the data he chose, I would not be surprised to see his catalogues persist in his market for years!

Next, having built high and enduring value into his catalogues, he offered "just 12" of his top suppliers the opportunity to sponsor a ‘table page’ with a full page advertisement in his catalogue - to be placed "opposite a table, of course, to ensure constant exposure - to huge numbers of customers, for years to come!"

What kind of costs were involved in creating such a powerful promotion?

Sponsorship funded a print run of 3,000 copies (sufficient to ‘blanket’ his industry); brought his costs back to "better-than-zero"; and achieved ‘distribution buy-in’ from the 12 advertisers, each of whom were offered 100 ‘free’ catalogues to distribute to their own key clients (each of whom is a potential consumer of our client's products).

What does it take to implement these kinds of strategies?

None of this is rocket science, but it does take a little thought, effort and organisation, but consider the results and then ask yourself:

"What can I do, starting today, to make my marketing material last in my marketplace?"