- A good-looking and informative ‘flyer’ will grow your business
Cut Costs, Not Quality
Businesses often scale back on marketing in difficult or uncertain economic times. But smart operators continue to market.
They know they can gain market share and cement customer loyalty while their competitors are withdrawing into themselves.
The challenge in tough times is to continue marketing effectively, but at a lower cost.
This does not mean simply going down-market. Low-cost materials are only low-cost if they get results. If they don’t work, they are simply a drain on your marketing budget.
Marketing needs to be both low in cost and high in quality.
The Marketing Plan – Basis Of Strategy
Before getting into details though let’s consider this point – your marketing strategy should grow out of a written marketing plan.
You may feel that you don’t need to produce a formal, written document. And writing can be time-consuming and a real headache. But the process of writing will force you to rethink your marketing in a rigorous and fundamental way.
As part of writing a marketing plan, you will need to carry out market research to identify who your customers are – their age, gender, occupation, income, education and location.
This will provide you with the opportunity later to target audiences and the type of marketing material most suited to them as well as the best channel for reaching them. All this can save money over a shotgun approach to advertising.
You will put in some time assessing your direct competitors and see how they advertise their products. This exercise can provide some useful ideas about what looks effective and what aspects of a product are being featured. You can use these as examples to improve upon where you can, though be careful you are not actually infringing their intellectual property rights.
Focus On Benefits, Not Features
And really importantly, the plan will specify how the features of your product or service will meet customer wants and needs, that is, define those features as benefits to your customers.
These identified benefits should then become the focus of your marketing material.
What is the difference between a ‘feature’ and a ‘benefit’ and why is it a key concept in marketing?
- Features are the characteristics of your product or service – or your company itself.
- Benefits are what your customers will derive by using those features.
To give an example – a soap company may produce a soap that is very effective at cleaning – that’s a feature. But when it’s promoted as also ‘beautifying’, then that’s a benefit.
You need to market to your strengths. This means analysing where your product features translate into benefits for your customers, where they cater directly to your customer’s wants and needs.
Your marketing materials should not focus on the features of your products and services, but rather what those features can do for your customers.
Be Clear About Your Marketing Objectives
Developing this level of clarity about your products or services will save time and money.
Where you have a better understanding of your product and your market, you are better placed to give clear directions to any marketing professionals you may use, such as advertisers and graphic designers.
And, if you have firm marketing objectives, you will be better placed to evaluate proposed marketing materials or to produce materials yourself where necessary.
Budget Decisions
Finally, when forming a marketing plan, you also need to think strategically about your budget, so that you are not making ad hoc decisions about potentially costly marketing channels and materials.
Form a promotional strategy that outlines which advertising media you can use and how you can ration your budget to most effectively reach your target group. Identify the papers and magazines that have the right readership and charge the appropriate rates for advertising.
For each channel you are considering ask:
- Is the message once off (such as a newspaper ad in one edition), or repeatable for little cost (another bunch of flyers)?
- Does the format (space on a page, time on air) allow you to excite enough interest to prompt people to call for an appointment, send in an order, or request additional information?
- What is the cost in terms of the number of responses it is likely to result in?
- Are the recipients actually your target audience?
Have A Materials Strategy
Now you have done all the homework it’s time to consider which advertising channel, or medium, is best for your type of business or for the particular promotion you have in mind.
For example, classified ads fuel some businesses while others use flyer distribution effectively. For restaurants, local newspaper ads are effective because most restaurant patrons live within a three to five mile radius.
Local shops find success with coupon advertising in community mail packs or on the back of supermarket receipts. And there’s no need to send out expensive brochures if a flyer will serve the purpose instead.
You may find that keeping persistent, low-key contact with your customers, using inexpensive materials, will give you just as good a result as a single campaign that features a glossy brochure.
A clear promotional and materials strategy will help you avoid making false economies. For example, advertising luxury goods on cheap materials could send the wrong message.
Choose Your Materials
Once you have your overall strategy worked out, you can think about ways to cut costs on specific materials.
Lets consider for the remainder of this article some of the range of low-cost materials that could be used in your business, such as flyers, hand-outs, business cards, faxes, emails, postcards, and giveaways such as mugs, buttons, pens, or ornaments, and how you can use them most effectively.
The Versatile Flyer
A flyer can be a very effective and versatile low-cost marketing tool.
You can include them with orders and invoices, pop them into bags at the cash register, hand them out in shopping malls or include them in correspondence to other parts of your supply chain, such as your distributors.
You do not have to hand them all out yourself, as you can enter into barter agreements with other businesses, where you agree to hand out flyers for each other.
Creating A Flyer
When creating a flyer, use a page-sized piece of paper. One colour may do, as nobody expects a flyer to have high design quality. But you should try to feature a picture or graphic that grabs attention and match it with a catchy headline that offers something to the customer.
Many flyers advertise special offers, but you can also design a flyer to give a standard snapshot of your business. This type of flyer could include a checklist of your services and main selling points.
Design For Content
Remember that nobody is going to sit down and study it, so your main message should be included in the headline, which can shout out the most attractive benefit of your product or service.
The headline can be followed by captions or tags that signal other benefits. You may include some detailed text for customers really interested in reading on. You might also consider including some customer testimonials.
If you do not have a communications specialist on your team, you may also want to get a professional copywriter to cast an eye over your copy. They should be able to find more direct and effective ways of getting your message across.
Don’t rely only on your own judgment when creating flyers or any other marketing publications. Brainstorm issues with your team at two or three stages during development and seek comments on ‘prototype’ publications before commissioning a print run.
Design For Appearance
Pay attention to the look of the flyer.
It shouldn’t look cramped, so include plenty of space around your text. The text of the flyer should not look too ‘busy’. It should use no more than a couple of font styles, for example, and they should generally be of the plain variety.
Be sparing in your use of bold type and don’t use whole lines or words in italics or upper case, as this is hard to read. It’s generally better to address readers as ‘you’ and use simple, direct language, keeping sentences to an average of no more than 15 words.
- Design for visual impact
Illustrations add a huge visual attractiveness to marketing materials but the costs involved in a special photo shoot are likely to put this option out of consideration. Fortunately these days it is relatively easy and inexpensive to create graphics of good quality.
If you can take a reasonable photo upload digital images from your digital camera. Lower quality images may be fine for a flyer, which is likely to be printed on lower quality paper, which shows limited detail.
Or, if you do want a more high-end image you could consider using a stock photo. These are obtainable from many agencies these days, often as easily obtained as downloading over the Internet from the supplier.
You may be able to use your own computer to make a high resolution master copy that a printer can work from. If you can afford to pay a graphic designer, you can supply them with a digital document and let them generate layout options.
Using Postcards
It’s important to maintain regular contact with your customers.
However, it’s not always practical to arrange a meeting. And retail clients are not likely to welcome phone calls or sales visits to their doorstep. So think about using postcards as an inexpensive and unobtrusive means of reminding people that you exist.
Standard sized postcards have a lower postage cost than a letter and are relatively inexpensive to produce and print. They also have the advantage that there is no envelope between the recipient and the message. Even if a client gives the card no more than a quick glance, they should pick up some marketing information from your headline.
When To Use Postcards
Provided that your customer is a regular one, and they do not mind receiving marketing material from you (please make sure you abide by privacy legislation), you can try mailing them monthly or quarterly, but no less frequently than every 90 days, after which you tend to disappear from the customer’s horizon.
You can use your customer database to help you send out cards that are timed for individual customers. If you run a motor dealership, for example, you could send out reminders for car servicing due dates.
But the postcards will be most welcome if they offer some benefit to the customer, such as an unadvertised discount.
Newsletters
A newsletter can be a very good way of maintaining contact with clients. It doesn’t need to sell aggressively – it merely needs to contain some information that is of use or interest to the client to raise your credibility.
But it’s hard to come up with interesting copy to fill a newsletter. It takes time and money. So if you’re looking at marketing budget cuts you might consider sending out a regular postcard newsletter.
A newsletter in the form of a postcard will still keep you in regular contact with your customers, but will cost less to produce and print, both in terms of time and money. You may use it to answer one or two common client questions, provide a checklist of key business dates, or remind people of important events.
Meeting Cards
You don’t need to spend a lot to show a client that they are important to you and that you are focused on giving them the best possible service. For example, you can send clients a personalised follow-up card after a meeting.
The card can summarise the outcomes of the meeting. It can be handwritten, showing your clients that you take a personal interest in them.
- Email Marketing
Email Marketing
You may also want to customise your emails with graphics, a logo, or a standard marketing tag message.
People hate getting unsolicited emails and they tend to be suspicious if the emails come with attachments, which may carry viruses. It may also be illegal for you to email people without their explicit consent. Please make sure you abide by privacy legislation.
Email Tips
But if you deal with regular customers, and they are willing to opt into an email list, emails can be a very cheap way to keep in touch. These customers will not want to be deluged with marketing emails but may not mind receiving occasional messages – as long as they see a clear benefit in each email.
Keep emails short and to the point and use them to announce special offers, sales, product launches or special events. You can also link emails to other marketing publications, letting customers know that something is in the mail, for example. Or you can use emails to solicit customer feedback.
The good thing about emails is that they cost the same, regardless of whether they go to one or a thousand recipients.
Don’t forget to include an option for recipients to be taken off your email list.
Business Cards
In tough times, you are likely to rely more on networking as a low-cost method of winning business. Your business card can be a valuable marketing tool in this area.
It helps if you have chosen a business or company name that clarifies what line of business you are in. You can then add a brief tag line to the card. The tag can encapsulate the key benefits or selling proposition of your products and/or service.
Business Card Design
Resist the temptation to go too down-market on card design.
You may be able to use desktop publishing software to design cards yourself, but good design basically grows out of the designer’s skill. Unless you are an exceptionally gifted individual, you won’t be able to match that skill. It’s better to use your ‘artistic’ eye to assess the options offered to you by a designer. This applies to most marketing materials even if they are low-cost. It’s good to get professional input at some point.
However there are some things to look out for when you have been presented with some design options:
- Your logo should form the basis of the card and be the largest element.
- Cards in unusual shapes usually don’t fit wallets or card holders – so they get lost.
- Keep it simple – strictly limit the amount of information on the card. Ensure this includes your name, title, company name, address, phone and fax numbers and email address.
- Make sure the typeface is easily readable.
- Limit it to one or two colours.
Giveaways
Giveaways can be a good way of maintaining your visibility.
Put your logo and a tag line on giveaway mugs, for example. Or consider putting your brand on hats, T-shirts, household trinkets, ornaments or mouse pads. You can also offer your products as prizes in radio contests or competitions at local events.
Showcase Your Expertise / Celebrate Your Successes
Depending on your line of work, consider writing articles for print or online srticle sharing sites such as Ezine Articles. The articles can showcase your business knowledge and expertise. And they only cost you time to produce.
It’s frequently the case that local newspapers and magazines are happy to receive reasonable quality copy, especially if accompanied by a photo or illustration. It saves them time gathering and creating stories.
If you have won any awards related to your products or services, or even won a mention somewhere – or if you support a local club or society of any sort you can turn the information into a small article that showcases you firm and submit it to the local media.
Use Low-cost Online Methods
Video is becoming a more and more popular as a medium for promoting business. A short video posted on video sharing sites such as You Tube have huge audiences.
Content sharing sites such as Squidoo and HubPages are free to use and can be useful in driving traffic to your website.
The use of Social Networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are also free to use and important low-cost methods of making cfontact with your target audience.
Keep Your Materials Coherent
So, there are a number of ways of creating reasonably economical marketing materials and opportunities. But as you develop them keep a couple of points in mind.
First, make sure all these different materials have a consistent look and feel. Try to maintain consistency in terms of colour scheme, logo, company details and message. Your materials should project a consistent personality for your business. If materials make contradictory claims about your products and/or services, they will generate suspicion or unease.
And, secondly, never miss an opportunity to include your business and contact details.
All marketing materials should request some action – that the client make a purchase, visit your store or make a call – so they need to know how to call you or where you are.
Some Final Thoughts From the Business Renegade – Small Business Marketing Consultant
Finally, remember that marketing materials are only as good as the thought that goes into them, regardless of how much they cost.
When you make marketing decisions, put yourself in the place of your audience. How can your business provide for their needs and wants? What can you provide better than your competitors? Use the answers to these questions to form your key marketing messages and then let your message determine the form of your marketing materials.
Use the right language for your audience. Keep it simple and direct as a general rule (though of course there will also be some specialist markets where people delight in lots of technical details).
Basically, you need to understand your customers. If you can frame a message to appeal to them, it will be much easier to market on a tight budget. Your messages will be high-value, even though they come on low-cost material.
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