Marketing techniques seldom work on their own. The first step is to generate brand awareness. If you have a budget, then you can create awareness via advertising, exhibitions, sponsorship, printed matter and a website development agency, for example. If your marketing is time based (i.e. your time), you can use alliance marketing partners, networking, press releases, referrals, talks, telesales, word of mouth marketing, blogs, e-newsletter, social media and a DIY website.
When you receive a sales enquiry, always ask how they found you. With a little prompting, it is not unusual to find that the prospective customer has come across your name in several places, which is of course a good thing. “Oh, I found you via search, subscribed to your newsletter and starting following you on Twitter.”
So which of these promotional techniques generated the sales enquiry? The answer is the techniques within which the prospective customer saw your brand name. Quite often, they will have see your name many times, in a variety of places, before they bought something from you and / or got in touch.
A specific response may of course be generated by direct marketing or a particular call to action. However – and this is the key point – customers are much more likely to react when they already know the brand name.
On this basis, my advice is to increase your promotional mix and to increase the frequency of communication. If you are strapped for cash – don’t panic! Use the numerous free / time based techniques which are available to you. There are literally hundreds of them, by the way.
Most of your messages float past in the breeze. Some of the messages are seen. Only a small percentage (typically 3%) of the members of any given market segment are ready to buy when they see your marketing messages. Therefore this is a numbers game. It is all about consistent communication, using a broad spectrum of communications techniques.
