 Marketing
Best Practices
Your Advertising Campaign
Making Tracks
by Jennifer Greacen, Director, Red Frog
Published: June / July 2008
With the economy a hot topic around every corner these
days, the frightening trend among small businesses has
been to all but abandon their marketing and advertising
campaigns. This is despite a multitude of case studies
and proven research demonstrating that brands who
persevere in a down-turned economy will rise above their
competitors as the dust settles.
Owner-operators especially have the majority of their
livelihoods invested within the four walls of their
business. Why would they stop inviting people to
participate? With the exception of very few
long-established neighborhood businesses, most can’t
just cease to exist. Rather than eliminating the
totality of their campaigns, we are recommending these
businesses move their marketing dollars towards
targeted, direct marketing campaigns that automate
measurable results.
Some of these include:
PURL (Personalized Uniform Resource Locators)
The alternative to traditional direct mail, PURLs
allow you to take most of the control back in the sales
process and stop waiting for your direct mail recipient
to come to you. A recipient’s name is appended to your
Web site via a variable data printing process. If your
prospect is John Smith, then the PURL may be
vip.yourbusiness/johnsmith. When your prospect sees his
name attached to your website and can’t help but log in,
he is greeted again personally on a landing page
designed to look like your website.
On the other end, you instantly receive email
notification that the prospect is online. If you pick up
the phone and call John, your chances of bringing him
into your business increase exponentially. Additionally,
data collection elements can be added to this landing
page to find out more about John’s interests and, in the
end, you can generate a full report to see how well this
direct mail campaign worked for you.
Cost: Set up averages $1,500.00. Per piece mailings
including postage average .75 per piece.
TEXT MESSAGING
Texting allows you to build a data base and market
back to the same with your messages. Say you are a flat
bread pizza shop and you offer a pizza of the week
recipe to your foodie consumer. By simply posting a sign
in your shop with this offer and a request to text PIZZA
to 55555 you will gather the information (cell phone
number and name) of the interested customers taking you
up on this offer. Now each week when you send out your
recipe, you are repeatedly marketing. You also have
their information to send a text out on a Saturday
evening reminding everyone to order early before the big
game tomorrow. Taking only seconds of production time,
it is fantastic for the business owner who needs to be
able to make a fast decision. Daily, weekly, or monthly,
you can log into your portal and review automatically
tracked information that will tell you how well your
promotions are working for you. The economically
wonderful thing about the world of text messaging is
that you are only paying for the contacts that want to
receive information from you.
Cost: Set up averages $750.00 and each contact made is
around 10 cents.
SOCIAL MEDIA
If it wasn’t enough that we had to jump on board
with our own websites 10 years ago (or face a complete
lack of credibility for not having one), we now are
quickly seeing businesses of all kinds using an advanced
web version called 2.0. Blogging and social networking
are among the largest of the most common participation.
A website is information out content, you telling the
prospect what you want to say while they passively view
your site. A blog however gives your customer base, and
even those on the outside with interest in your
industry, an opportunity to share feelings and ideas on
a particular subject matter. It allows you to interact
directly with your customers in a social network of
other potential prospects giving you an instant
measurement of online traffic.
Tracking and measured response mechanisms can be built
in to the blog in a variety of ways.
From “sign up to receive” forms to more advanced
click-through technology, you can gather a variety of
information from visitors based on what your goals are
for data collection. While not as customizable or
immediately interactive as blogs, websites like Facebook
or MySpace are great complements to your web 2.0
portfolio. They offer you an online social network to
reach out and find not only customers, but other
valuable business relationships per your particular
industry or interests. These low cost, easy-to-maintain
methods of marketing (and networking) will shape the
next generation of business and dramatically reduce mass
media costs. (Check out how many commercial impressions
you could generate on YouTube for $0.00 out of pocket).
Cost: Varies based on
programming, but averages can range from FREE to $2,000
for a strong, well-equipped setup and professional
maintenance.
Whichever vehicle(s) you choose to drive your marketing,
remember one simple truth: customers can’t buy from you
if they can’t find you. Keep marketing. By employing
targeted marketing methods with response-tracking and
measurement features, you can better control costs and
make smarter decisions with each new investment.
Jennifer Greacen is a
marketing strategist, founder and director of Red Frog,
a marketing, advertising and public relations firm in
Largo, Florida. Red Frog is an award winning agency that
specializes in small businesses and creative,
non-traditional campaigns including the use of new
technology.
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