Have you ever come across a business before, one you’ve never seen, and went in to notice what great deals they had? They sell exactly what you’ve been looking for at the perfect prices. You’re so excited by the find and start talking to the person behind the counter. “Did you just open?” you ask them, and they answer with, “No, we’ve been here for years.”
Online and offline marketing are not incapable of working together. I think so many people are trying to claim that many styles of offline marketing are dead in an effort to make themselves believe all they need is the internet to meet their marketing needs.
There are so many possibilities out there for business cards and yet so few people bother to make good use of them.
I think the real reason is because a lot of people are a little fearful of going onto uncharted territory. Business cards are a staple of commercial printing. Every company has their order of them made, no matter how big or small they are, and the thing is, most of those cards look strikingly similar.
Guess what: you have competition.
I know you have competition, and I’ve never worked for your company. Your customers know you have competition. In fact, I’d wager they are the ones most keenly aware of the fact that you have competition, because they’re the people most likely to have interest in jumping the fence and trying that competition out.
I’ve picked up catalogs before where it seemed like the company who made it didn’t really care about marketing with it. This is a list of products and little else. The words they used in the product descriptions and the way they formatted the catalog suggests they had no interest in trying to sell anything.
Most people aren’t going to put a lot of thought to advertisements when they read them. The reason is because of just how many advertisements there are out there. They’ll take in what the information says, but that doesn’t mean they’ll always be inclined to apply it to them personally.
Customers don’t look at the inner workings of a company. When they first look at a store or are handed a business card, they’re not looking at the sales charts for the company or the experience the people working there have. What people see is the image that is presented by the company to the public, and nothing else.
It can seem so technical. Only large companies are going to have extensive databases about all of their sales along with any other information they feel like keeping track of.
For the small business owner, using something a little less formal might be better, you might think to yourself. If you work freelance you might even just try to remember who your clients are by simply remembering. After all, if your customer base is small enough, why not just keep track of it in your head?
Sometimes we focus so much on ad layout and strong marketing pitches that we forget one of the most important questions regarding advertising. When? That’s right, the timing of your marketing efforts is just as important as the how’s and why’s. With that in mind let’s take a look at some of the times you should consider a new ad campaign.
Large conglomerates have similarly large advertising budgets allowing forays into all sorts of marketing avenues. Small businesses do not have such luxuries. They must make every advertising dollar count. There are some universal rules, which apply to all small businesses attempting to maximize their advertising ROI.
