Well, the good news is, you now have the opportunity to plan a really great marketing campaign. The bad news is, your boss actually expects to see results!
Let’s take a look at your budget. You have $20,000 to spend? That’s a big budget! Really cool! Now… let’s see what kind of campaign we can come up with. To start, we need a really great Creative Concept. What self respecting marketing campaign goes without a creative concept? Then of course, we just have to have that huge full page, full color advertisement in the most prominent daily. Maybe a short burst on the radio or television would be good.
With $20,000? You could not even get out of the door with that campaign. Let us put things into perspective. You have a marketing campaign to run, and you need to see results. So, you need to have a solid marketing concept, then you need to have a great marketing plan to execute that marketing concept. So, besides the creative concept (it ain’t free!), the marketing plan and the execution, then you have to create the visuals and get down to the actual print work, online stuff and so on. Now, if you want to know the RESULTS, you will also need to budget some kind of market survey. This is needed to see a before/after scenario. Otherwise, your marketing campaign is over, how do you know what the results are?
As a small marketer, you need to be aware that you are constrained by budgets. You do not have the hundreds of thousands of dollars to spend on an elaborate marketing campaign. Just to raise consumer awareness using a traditional advertising campaign will require a frequency of exposure that will likely make it beyond the reach of most small to medium sized companies.
But all is not lost. Direct Marketing is a very powerful and often over-looked tool in the marketer’s arsenal. Your marketing campaign can be made so much more targeted and results more grounded by employing direct marketing in the campaign.
A quick definition, direct marketing as we are talking about here, refers to any kind of direct response marketing that is targetted to an individual (as much as it is possible to do so). Examples of direct marketing would be
- Flyers mailed to a customer
- Email campaign
- Coupons
Of course, there are other direct marketing methods, and the above is just a sampling. Why would you want to add direct marketing to your marketing campaign? On the surface, it always looks like direct marketing is much more expensive than a general advertising above-the-line program. Your $20,000 above can easily translate to a few advertisements in several local print media and reach hundreds of thousands of people.
But consider this:
- direct marketing is highly targeted, noise (wastage) is extremely low
- direct marketing allows a direct response
- direct marketing is easily tracked (from a returned coupon, a phone call, a form…)
Your $20,000 can be well spent if you set aside a portion of it to create a flyer with a simple discount coupon and mail it to your customer base. This simple action, would have increased the power of your marketing campaign at many levels. While your print advertisements will reach its hundreds of thousands, the flyer will reach your existing customers. They will USE the coupons, get a discount and actually buy something from you. Therein lies the “results” that your boss is so hungry for!
Better yet, the side effect is that for everyone who has seen the advertisement, but is not a customer, they have no discount coupon! Now THAT will surely spur them to try to get on your mailing list. Suddenly, it becomes important. Word of mouth now comes into play. OK, before we get too carried away by how exciting a simple direct marketing campaign can become, let’s get back on track.
Your simple print advertising campaign, supplemented with a small direct marketing campaign can yield results for your marketing campaign that would have much more impact than relying solely on the exposure bought by your print ads. Just getting a form of feedback from your advertising campaign would already be reason enough to include direct marketing as part of your overall campaign.
[tags]marketing, direct marketing, print advertising, brochures[/tags]
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