What is marketing and how do you get the most out of your marketing dollar?

Marketing is a very broad area of business management and while it has many different components to consider, small businesses generally don’t have different departments to handle each of them. We help our clients to pull together marketing collateral that give them the best bang-for-marketing-buck, while considering their broader marketing perspective.

So what is marketing?

Marketing is defined by the American Marketing Association as:

"The activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners and society at large."

According to Wikipedia:

Marketing is used to create, keep and satisfy the customer, with the customer as the focus of its activities. It involves broad market research; market targeting and market segmentation; determining distribution, pricing and promotion strategies; developing a communications strategy; budgeting; and visioning long-term market development goals. Many parts of the marketing process (e.g. product design, Art direction, Brand management, advertising, Copywriting etc.) involve use of the creative arts.

How we look at marketing:

We review our client’s marketing by looking at what’s been done in the past, who it is aimed at, where the audience is located and what language has been used. We look at what radiates with them to see what is going to be the best option to get our clients over the line with the least amount of budget spend.

A small business perspective

Small businesses tend to have pretty tight marketing budgets, especially if they are just starting up and while there’s a broad range of marketing tools to choose from, it’s often not viable, or necessary, to spread marketing budgets across many different marketing tools.

Marketing tools

Marketing tools are simply your end products for your marketing campaigns. Some examples include:

Websites
Business cards
DL Flyers, A4 Flyers
Postcards
Posters
Product labels
A frame boards
Swing tags
Etc.

How to get best bang-for-marketing-buck

There are ways you can get multiple marketing uses of different types of marketing tools. It just takes a little bit of creative thinking. We’ve worked with thousands of different small businesses in our 15 years and have come up with many different creative ideas for getting great bang-for-marketing-buck.

What if you are a commercial painter?

It’s no value to you to drop off flyers in a residential area however, if you were also interested in residential work there are ways you could make one flyer work for both areas. Now what if that flyer also had a tare off section with lines you can write on for a quote – something similar to a business card? While you are working on one home, you could drop off the tare off section to houses either side and opposite with a quick quote. This is one way to get multiple uses out of one marketing tool – a DL flyer with a tare off section you can write on. This now has multiple uses and you haven’t boxed yourself in. It could be added to noticeboards, used in networking groups and for both residential and commercial audiences.

What if you are an online store?

A business card is not going to be as useful to you as a swing tag with a hole punch that has an open area to write on. You can write prices and sizes on it, or provide a coupon for your customers next order or just use it as a business card. Again, multiple uses to save you money.

Buy in bulk

Always consider buying your marketing tools in bulk. This will save you money over the longer term. Just make sure you’ve put enough thought into multiple uses of your marketing tools so you limit the number of different tools you need to print. Printing 50 DL flyers will cost you about $200, whereas you’ll only pay around $250 for 2000!! And hopefully you’ve planned several different uses for your flyers.

Book one of our 2 hour brainstorming sessions to get our creative team to brainstorm creative ideas to get best-bang-for-marketing-buck for your business. We love a challenge and you’ll feel sorted, knowing you’ve harnessed creative ways to make your marketing dollar go further and get you better results.

COME AND SPEAK TO US ABOUT YOUR MARKETING

If you think you might need some extra help or a bit of a boost, you might be interested in coming in for a 2hr “Marketing Brainstorm”, which we offer for $240 + gst. Our clients are loving them. You’ll walk away with new ideas to get moving with.

We’ve had quite a bit of experience marketing for many different businesses and I think it’s a great way to get some fresh ideas and keep up that momentum to gain some growth.In this chat, we discuss in depth: