Making The Most Of Your Marketing Moolah

Times are tough for many entrepreneurs. But you know what? This is the time to keep one of the Golden Rules of Business in mind: You’ve got to spend money to make money! So, while you may be slashing budgets to keep those profit margins where you’d like, slashing your marketing budget should not be on your “to-do” list at all. Why? Because if you don’t market to potential customers and remind them that you’re out there, ready, willing and able to serve them, times could get even tougher. You definitely don’t want that!

With that in mind, spend wisely. Here are a few tips on how to do just that:

• Choose marketing tactics that will help you to reach the greatest number of qualified customers (those who you’ve identified as being in your target market) rather than general audiences.
  
  
• Don’t skimp on the quality for quantity. You may be tempted to cut corners to get marketing pieces out to the most customers in the least amount of time and / or cost but don’t give in to temptation! Your marketing materials are a reflection of you / your business. Consumers know cheap, rushed marketing collateral when they see it…and they make a judgment about you based on it.
  
  
• Be selective on who receives printed materials; close deals with hot leads, give warm leads the necessary information to win them over, and exchange business cards / contact information with cold leads.
  
  
• Every potential customer does not need all of the marketing collateral you’ve created for your business. So, don’t hesitate to pick who gets what. If you sell face-to-face, provide a brochure instead of a full sales kit if possible. Or, if your brochure provides an overview of your services / products and you’d like to provide additional information, create a one-sheet that summarizes the content in the sales kit to accompany a brochure. If you sell via the Internet or over the phone, incorporate emailing attachments of your sales materials into your routine.
  
  
• Consider trying a new medium or a new form for your marketing. For example, just because you’ve always advertised in a certain publication, that doesn’t mean you have to continue to do so. If a source isn’t a heavy revenue or lead generator, apply the monies you would’ve spent on that towards another form of marketing or use that same advertisement and format it for use in alternate ways—advertising in less costly publications, as direct mail, in e-marketing, etc.
  
  
• Use your website! Unless your website designer charges for maintenance on your website or changes to the site, it won’t cost anything to add PDF versions of your marketing collateral to your website…or to add pages to your website with the content; if you opt to add pages to your website but want to control who sees that information, do not create an active link to those pages. Instead, have your web designer provide you with the URLs to each of the pages and send that to specific clients.

Whether you use one or all of the tips above, remember that marketing does not equal sales. That’s to say, marketing is necessary to attract clients and it can lead to sales but it’s not a one to one ratio. Therefore, be realistic about the expected return on your investment. One to three percent is a safe presumption for expected return. If you can truly pinpoint your marketing to the appropriate target demographic and if you’re able to expose them to your marketing message three or more times, you may be able to increase that percentage.