Opportunity knocking...
Method to the madness – The vehicles
Opportunity knocking...
CANVASSING
You can call on prospects yourself, or you can have someone do it for you. It’s effective, time-consuming, and inexpensive, unless you do it yourself and figure your hourly rate. Canvassing should be considered if your target audience can be found running stores, working in offices, or living in residential neighborhoods.
PERSONAL LETTERS
Again, not expensive, quite effective, and a very direct way of saying all that you have to say to the exact people to whom you ought to be saying it. With word processing, personal letters enable you to add your personal touch to letters. This is a prime method of contact with 5-10% effectiveness.
TELEPHONE CALLS
You can make them yourself, saying approximately what you’d say in canvassing. Or, you can delegate the phoning task to others. Tele-Marketing is growing, in direct pro-portion to the resentment building against it. Still, for those people with a winning telephone manner, this low cost method of marketing should be given serious consideration.
DISTRIBUTING CICULARS
Printed circulars cost only pennies each, and they may be distributed in specially targeted areas: wealthy neighbor-hoods, shopping malls and parking lots, areas with large concentrations of white-collar workers, flea markets, and a whole lot more. Your circular can be as brief as eight well-chosen words, or as lengthy as eight well-worded pages-making your circular a brochure.
POSTING BULLETINS
You can post your circular in a high-traffic location or locations. Some localities have companies that offer to post your bulletin in twenty locales, each with a well-read bulletin board. This is another unique, low-cost method of marketing your product or service. Post either your circular or your specially designed bulletin or poster.
CLASSIFIED ADS
Still Another of the low-cost marketing methods. You can home in on your target market with low-cost classified ads run in newspapers and magazines throughout the United States. A relatively profitable mail-order business has been run for many years with the same ad as the only marketing method. These can be the prime marketing method for many businesses.
SIGNS
These are usually less wordy than circulars but considerably larger. Signs are excellent for certain businesses such flea markets, garage sales, knife-sharpening services, fruit stands, and the like. Low-cost, they are worth considering if at all feasible for your earning endeavor.
YELLOW PAGES ADVERTISING
Almost any business can benefit from Yellow Pages exposure. My businesses have benefited from this vehicle, listing our names. Yellow Pages work wonders for some businesses, enabling you to run ads as big as your biggest competitor. To do the same with consistent newspaper ads would be very costly.
NEWSPAPER ADVERTISING
Now, we’re getting to where marketing costs can add up. However, newspaper advertising does not have to be very costly. Small ads in local papers cost little. For newspaper ads to be an effective tool, you must run your ads consistently. So even a small cost becomes a big cost when you multiply an inexpensive ad by the 52 times you ought to run it. Consistent exposure tells your message to a whole lot of people and breeds confidence at the same time. The higher the level of confidence, the greater the level of sales.
DIRECT MAIL
This is similar to writing personal letters. Only instead of mailing only 5 letters, you mail thousands. Direct mail has been the most productive marketing method for many businesses, and least for many others. It proves what the pro’s say, test…test…test..! Direct mail ordinarily means that your message gets sent, in your words, to a list of people purchased from a direct mail company. It enables you to zero in on a clearly targeted group of people and is keystone to many a success story.
RADIO ADVERTISING
Although each radio commercial is not expensive, the number of commercials required to adequately advertise a product or service usually necessitates a rather large sum of money. Still, with a few hundred dollars, radio enables you to make a widely heard splash in a selected area. Your local radio station can help immensely in selecting schedules and producing the finished commercial. For some businesses, radio is amazingly effective.
TELEVISION ADVERTISING
I doubt if you need me to tell you that TV is the most costly and the most effective form of advertising medium ever devised. It allows you to reach a gigantic number of people to demonstrate your product or service, to use both audio and video techniques to put your point across, to gain credibility that comes with TV advertising, and to add touches of glamour and pizzazz to your message. Be careful, though: TV is a complex medium, and its misuse is as common as its use. If you can possibly see your way toward using it, talk to an expert first. If you use TV carefully, you’ll love it. If you misuse it, you’ll spend a bundle and waste most of it.
BILLBOARD ADVERTISING
Basically, this is a reminder medium, best used when combined with other marketing tools. Nevertheless, some businesses thrive on billboard advertising. If you think yours could be one of them, look into the medium. The best billboard phrase is “Next Exit.” Maybe your business can make use of a billboard carrying these words.
PUBLIC RELATIONS
This marketing tool works best when combined with advertising. Public relations basically means “planting” stories about your business in news-papers, magazines, TV, or radio. The story appears not as an ad, but as a legitimate news article. Although PR will give you credibility, you have little control and no possibilities of repetition. Since repetition is so important, reliance solely on PR is rarely a good idea.
ADVERTISING SPECIALTIES
Ball-point pens with store names, calendars with company names, and doodads of almost any kind featuring the name of a business -that’s what I mean by advertising specialties. Right now, my desk has a paper-clip holder from KIX106.6FM, a ruler with US Navy imprint, and a key ring from somebody’s bar with the Coke emblem – making me a typical audience for advertising special-ties. How effective are they? Beats me. Though I do listen to KIX 106, while sipping Coca-Cola, and reminded of a tour in the Navy.
EVENTS
This can easily be put under the heading of public relations, but it can also stand by itself. A turkey race is an event. So is an Auto race, especially if one of the cars has your business name on it. Street parties qualify as an event, as do contests, sweepstakes, and hot dog eating parties. For some endeavors, events are just the ticket.
FREE SEMINARS AND DEMONSTRATIONS
I have been transfixed by a dexterous and facile in-store demonstrator. And my wife was once persuaded to write a $650 check after attending a “free” seminar. If, by giving a seminar, lecture, or demonstration of your service, you can raise a healthy crop of customers, by all means add this method to your marketing bag of tricks.
SAMPLING
This is somewhat akin to free demonstrations, but different enough to deserve a paragraph. Sampling is very expensive, and unless you have a product or service so good that a single use will result in repeat business, you should steer clear of sampling. On the other hand, there is no better way to truly market your offering if one exposure is likely to lead to a continuos purchase. A few products in my house would never have found their way there if they hadn’t first made an appearance as a free sample. Sampling is not done by many businesses, so if you can employ it you will be assailed by little competition.
TRADESHOWS, EXHIBITS, AND FAIRS
A good number of firms use impressive display booths at shows and fairs as their primary marketing tool. Some businesses inherently lend themselves to such methods of propaganda. If yours is one, be sure to check out the possibilities of exhibiting your product or service to the semi-attentive throngs who will visit the show, exhibit, or fair at which your product or service will be displayed. It’s almost always a good idea to disseminate circulars & brochures at your booth.
MAGAZINE ADVERTISING
Surprise! It costs less than $800 to run a full-page ad in Time magazine. Of course, that’s a full page ad in the Indianapolis edition of Time. The point is that many magazines publish regional editions, and the cost to get in those is far less than you might imagine. With one-half column ad, the cost drops dramatically. So even a part-time, run-from-home endeavor might benefit from magazine advertising. Many national magazines have classified sections, and these particularly are worth looking into as a potential ad medium. Magazines make it easy to target an audience, and lend prestige to your offering. All that plus reprints you can mail or display years after the original ad ran.
UNIQUE AND NEW MARKETING TOOLS
Since new methods of getting the word out are constantly being developed, I include some of them here. Among such methods: paid word of mouth advertising, searchlights, parade ads, skywriting, dirigible ads, bus and taxi signs, people wearing sandwich boards, ads on benches, T-shirt ads, shopping bags, bowling and Little League sponsorship, and many more. Once you begin promoting your business, you may well be contacted by these off-the-wall media representatives. I suggest listen carefully to these reps, then decide how fitting the method is. Just because it’s new doesn’t mean it’s not great.
Let us not forget the Internet. Many good manuals are out there on the subject, and the medium is growing at an unbelievable rate. This you MUST check out for yourself.
