There are many ways for you to promote your business. Often as business owners and operators, we find ourselves stuck with old habits and don’t take the sufficient time and energy to commit to marketing ourselves to reach our full potential. The common saying “Image is everything” is the quintessential phrase when you peek into the world of how to market your self and your company.

I remember back when I started in the rental business. The now, seemingly unsophisticated marketing strategies we adopted were, at the time, very forward thinking. Back in the 90’s and in the early days of Y2K, print advertising was king. Whether it was placement ads in the yellow pages, or more targeted advertisements in our industries’ trade publications, the way we chose to reach new customers was through direct means. At this point, the Internet was still a novelty and businesses around the world used the Internet to simply supply some limited information to its consumers.

In today’s marketplace, the development of a forward pressing marketing approach has become increasingly complicated, but at the same time easier for small business to grab hold of and run with. In years past, only large companies had the marketing budgets and personnel to launch full scale marketing programs to their customers. With the bulk of these strategies vested in advertising and direct mail campaigns, it left little room for small business to succeed with similar strategies.

With the onset of the digital age, the dependence on “old-school” means of graphic design and print production were set in the history books. Today’s methods allow for greater flexibility, smaller production runs, and customization that can be executed at the small business level.

The key to developing your own strategy requires you to understand the fundamentals behind current day marketing theory, and decide how you and your company can best utilize the combination of internal personnel and hired professionals. The complete marketing solution for any company needs to address each of the following: Branding, Direct Advertising, Public Relations & Interactive

Branding:
Considered the cornerstone of your marketing strategy, the branding of your company and its services is perhaps the most important and its development will require the most time and diligence to effectively pass your corporate message to your customers and potential customers. Your branding message whether expressed or implied, needs to be clear, concise, and consistent. The message should be clearly conveyed in every aspect of your companies visible presence including but not limited to Corporate Logo(s), corporate stationary, website design, advertisements, printed brochures or other collateral, invoices, vehicle markings, and product packaging. The image of your company and more importantly the perceived image of your company by your customers and potential customers is delivered through your branding message.

Companies often spend many years developing their branding message as an evolving process. As with our experiences, most companies branding message is never set in stone. Although, we all would hope to create a message that would be timeless, our businesses usually follow the needs of our customers and when their needs change so must our message.

About eight years ago, we established a great relationship with a company that specializes in marketing, design, and creation of new media. We found that our expertise of running a great business did not necessarily qualify us as an expert marketer. With the collaboration between our two companies we were able to work together to come up with a branding message that visually conveyed the message we are attempting to bring to our customers.

One of the most important processes we started with was our corporate style guide. The style guide served as a template from which all other production media would be created. The style guide included the proper usage of our corporate logo, fonts that would be used for various print applications, and a common color schemes to be used throughout our media, as it was re-branded.

Direct Advertising:
Any effort you take to contact and reinforce your branding message through direct means should be included within the scope of your direct advertising campaign. This commonly can include pay for space advertisements found in the “Yellow Pages” or other print periodicals, but should also include any other direct contact delivery methods such as direct mail pieces, brochures, newsletters, and radio/television advertisements.

The most effective direct advertising campaigns not only include your clear and concise branding message but also must be focused on driving action, awareness, or attention to your cause. Try to create a call to action with your direct advertising that you will be able to monitor its success with hard numbers. Do you have different phone numbers, websites, or email addresses that you can utilize to effectively measure the success or non-success of a given campaign?

One other key element to creating an effective direct advertising campaign is to set up a plan and a budget to cover the frequency and costs of running the campaign. With a pre-established plan, the creation of the direct advertising collateral becomes clear, and its implementation something that you can manage throughout the year.

Public Relations
The concept of Public Relations (PR) is by no means a new idea, but the acceptance of this method as a viable way for most any size business to deliver concise information to its clientele using untraditional means is growing. In many circumstances, businesses can generate huge success with PR campaigns with very limited financial resources. The primary cost behind any aggressive PR campaign will come with your time and energy spent creating the right content to fit within existing editorial coverage.

In many cases your immediate opportunities for success with PR will be on the local level. Look to your local/regional newspaper or other periodical that highlights community events. Contact the editor, and try to sense if they would be open to working with an outside source to supply a single or series of articles about event planning. With certain events, try to pitch a pre-event PR push to raise awareness about an upcoming event including dates, contact information, and of course the key players producing the event. Not only will your customer appreciate the added publicity, but your company’s name and identity in the market will be strengthened.

Other areas that can be grouped within PR can include sponsorships or involvement with the events that your company produces. If these events are open to the public or are charitable in nature, consider attending and getting to know the staff photographers that are covering the event. With time, your face, identity, and involvement with these events will secure added editorial coverage.

If you have any skill with a pen, consider writing a story about your company to pitch to a local business focused periodical. Many editors continually struggle to find relatable content that comes with next to zero cost.

When creating content, focus on issues common to many businesses, and try to limit the amount of self-promotional dialog within the content. Hot topics discussing sustainability, “Green Events”, overcoming disaster, and/or challenge are key elements editors look for in their content. Try to think in the mind of the reader. Example: A story about your company, highlighting your business type, the market you focus on, and perhaps your history would be much more attractive to an editor if the story was positioned around a “struggle for power”, i.e. overcoming some sort of challenge or devastation, the role family plays in growing your business, the positive affect a sluggish economy has played in the success of your business, etc.

Interactive:
Most Internet and electronic forms of your overall marketing plan will be included within your Interactive strategies. As with Direct Advertising and any Public Relations efforts, your branding message should be clearly and consistently conveyed through all forms of interactive media. Common forms of interactive media might include websites, electronic newsletters, electronic promotions, social media networking, and “Pay-per-Click” advertising. The distinguishing difference between conventional print media and interactive media is the ability for you to objectively measure your results with an interactive campaign where results of conventional print campaigns are largely subjective in nature.

The fundamental element behind any interactive campaign rests in your ability to track its success and modify its elements to increase your success through a process of trial and error. By first initiating a tracking process on your existing interactive media, most commonly your corporate website, you will be able to tell in a relatively short amount of time where your visitors are coming from, how much time they are spending on your website, and what pages seem to draw more attention from your visitors.

A great tool for doing this is offered free of charge from Google. The system called “Google Analytics” when configured will provide you a small source of HTML code that your Webmaster can slip in the background of each of the webpages that comprise your site. Once installed, each time a visitor enters your website, the Google Analytics system records and tracks the visitors movement throughout your site and creates an database of this information for you to call up on an as-needed basis. With the data you gain, you will be able shape and mould the content of your site to increase its performance and its ability to turn visitors into customers.

Along with securing good data of your website visitors, you should also make it clear and easy for your visitors to register with your company to participate in future email based promotions, newsletters, or other e-based solutions. The collection process of this email address data and the intention of its usage must to be clear for your visitors to abide by anti-spam regulations. Potentially think about a promotion where you can offer a coupon, discount, or other service as a benefit once they register in your database.

Once you begin to acquire an established customer email list, use the opportunity to strategize how you want to use this list. Blast email providers such as Constant Contact are a relatively low cost solution for getting information to a mass audience. As you formulate your delivery and frequency strategy, keep in mind that the content you send will have a direct correlation to the success of the campaign in bringing action to your cause.

Another great way to increase your visibility in the marketplace is through the use of social media networks like Facebook. If you have not signed up for account, you should probably think about it. A recent stat shows that Facebook has over 400 million active users, with approximately 50% of these users choosing to log on to the service each day. With those kinds of numbers, large portions of your customers are most likely using this service. If you are not, you might be missing some potential opportunities to connect or reconnect with your customers.

With a little bit of focus on your goals, the development of a new marketing strategy for your company is not far away. The entire process can begin for you and your company with a blank piece of paper and a little time to construct your own strategy. Look to your friendly competitors, industry friends, and look beyond our industry for ideas in your every day lives that provide you with inspiration. Lastly, try not to create your marketing strategies in isolation. Look to your employees and co-workers for feedback as the process unfolds.

For additional information please contact Alex Kouzmanoff at a.kouzmanoff@aztectent.com