PlusOne – Marketing Musings

With the effects of the global slowdown starting to be felt here in Australia, many businesses, both large and small are reviewing costs in order to maintain profitability.

Cuts to expenditure can occur at many levels and are often influenced by sales volume and demand.

One of the first areas to be cost is staff numbers. Lower production/sales means less people are needed in the business, so numbers are trimmed.

Another area that is high on the list of expenditures to be cut is marketing.

Often this is because few businesses really measure the effectiveness of marketing on overall business performance.

However, during recessions can be the best time to be maintaining or even increasing your marketing budget.

One reason is because many of your competitors will be reducing their marketing expenditure, thus creating a vacuum in the market for people’s need to know where they can get the product or service.

By maintaining your visibility, you are leveraging your place in the market as being a robust, reliable business able to withstand the current economic situation.

In other words, people will see you as a trusted business, able to supply and service and this position is much harder to achieve in the good times.

But that is not to say that money can be squandered. Instead it is time to be thinking target marketing, focusing on specific niches in innovative ways.

Its time to think smarter – and people already are using smarter marketing.

Take for instance, the small pub in country NSW. Normally ads go in the weekly paper – radio does not work because the town is small and a larger regional centre means only locals will attend the pub.

So they turned to SMS instead, using a list they have built up over several months (asking patrons to supply their mobile number if they wanted to get notifications of specials, free beers, bistro offers  txted to them) this now forms the basis for an affordable, targeted form of advertising that allows the pub owners to be able to rapidly deploy a mini campaign at low cost.

On top of that, by having the offer involve showing the message, the results are easily measured.

Or how about the furniture retailer who sends notices of sales?  By sending out messages on the morning of the sale, they create an imperative within the recipient to act or miss out.  This imperative carries forward when the customer arrives on site…the sale is today only – don’t miss out!!

The results are so good they have been able to reduce their print advertising, using some of the savings on their SMS marketing and have cash left over!

Or the take-away food shop who sends out a daily special to people within 1km of the store?

By thinking about who your customers are, what they want and telling them about how you can fill that need in a timely targetted way, you can make your marketing much more cost effective.

Start by building your list (permission-based of course!!) with a poster in store and note-paper  where people can write their details and leave in a box provided – or even run a SMS based enrollment process – “Send your Name to XXXXXXX to subscribe to our SMS offers service”.

A well thought out SMS offer is perfectly suited. Feel free to call to Matt to discuss 0409349752.

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