One of the secrets behind the most successfully marketed small and medium sized businesses, is that they utilise more forms of marketing than their less successful counterparts! In my experience, ‘the average’ business will use just two or three different kinds of marketing – yet the most successful businesses will be benefiting from eight or more.
Compound marketing leverage
By developing a marketing strategy, which leverages many complimentary forms of marketing, you start to build a ‘compound marketing’ effect. This is where the results you get for your combined efforts, are far, far greater than they would be; if you had done each activity in isolation.
Also, by relying on a number of different forms of marketing, your business’ future is far more secure. I interviewed a businesswoman once, who relied on an advertisement in an industry magazine for almost all her new business. A competitor then started advertising in the same publication. Overnight, her sales and enquiries dropped by more than half and she eventually went broke!
If you currently rely on just a small number of marketing activities, no matter how effective they currently are, make sure you are not too reliant on any one of them and always look for new ways to get great results.
Over to you
What forms of marketing have been the most (or least) effective for YOU? Share your experiences with a comment below!
Jim, excellent point and one that I would add to. I think that not only should there be more than one avenue of marketing but a constant questioning of whether the current marketing practices are yielding the right results. In sales you wouldn’t believe how many people just do things because “it has always been done”. I can also see that being a marketing issue as well.
This is awesome advice! We always need to be open to new resources and take the time to discover new possibilities for our marketing efforts.
The least effective for me by far was advertising in local print. I tried newspapers and a few local magazines and didn’t receive a single new client.
The most effective for me has been WOM by far. Social Networking has been huge for me. Twitter and B2B networks have brought several new clients my way in the past 4 months alone.
Social Networking sites have also been responsible for allowing me to be involved in some pretty amazing JV’s.
This is especially true of the real estate industry. Brokers and agents are resistant to anything outside of their traditional comfort zones and use the excuse that it takes too much time to learn anything new. Its those that are learning that using different distribution points for their marketing exposure and making it more about the property and less about themselves that are going to acquire the lion’s market share of the future. Did a great podcast interview with @garyvee yesterday on this exact subject.
If your target community is multi-generational, you need to have a multi-generational marketing platform. In this format here, most of us like social media and when using it wisely, it helps. Yet plenty of people – including executive and management types – have spent a long time in more traditional mediums and are not in this arena yet. It comes back to knowing as much as you can about your target community.
Your post and Mike Price are right on target.
I have abandoned print and door flyers as ineffective in the face of the GURU’s that insist we should double our frequency.
We need to embrace (and Learn) the new mediums.
Thank you
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Excellent post and the real world example “I interviewed a businesswoman once…” puts it all into perspective. Thanks!
Does word-of-mouth count as part of a marketing plan? If so, how can a business encourage its clients to pass it on?
Hi Jim,
I can’t talk about how effective marketing was for me because my business is just starting so I don’t have the big picture yet.
But I can say that I observe that the basic principles always apply no matter what we are talking about. Just like when we say it’s good to develop multiple income streams so that if one of them fails then you still have the other ways of making money. I see that in marketing the same principle applies mainly because marketing leads to more potential clients and finally to more money. So it’s a common sense to understand that if one of the ways of attracting clients fails then your business will suffer.
Thanks for the information. My eyes are now opening to some new directions that the basic principles may apply to.
Nice post Jim. You are correctly stating the obvious about the marketing plan and the Marketing ‘Actions.’ There is no ONE method to rely on, there are MANY to acquire and use.
I am using this same methodology with a number of my small business clients. Developing their ‘evolving’ marketing plan using more agile methods, and presenting the ROI from each.
Great post again.
Matt Nees
Great post, in answer to your questions, we use referrals from clients, colleagues, Business Link, Train to Gain and a range of other sources.
We also network in our local area, Leeds as well as online networking tools such as Ecademy.
Begining to use social media such as Facebook, Twitter etc to support marketing activities.
We use online directories and links to our site and also get traffic from out blog and micro sites to our main website.
Have just written a book – Brighter Marketing Bible for Small Businesses and using this as a marketing tool.
We regularly speak at various events and also run our own seminars from time to time.
In essence we work hard at our marketing and as you can see use more than one method. We have used Direct Mail and advertising in the past – but they weren’t the most effective for us.
Thanks
Joanne
Email marketing and targeted coupon distribution have yielded the most positive results for us this year. Local print advertising didn’t work for us.
nice post.
i guess some people don’t think about that old saying about putting all your eggs in one basket.