The current, tough business climate is no time to stop or curtail your marketing. It’s long been proven that those who are the most active in down times are rewarded with greater market share. Now more than ever, it’s essential to be a strategic marketer and make every dollar count. Following are tips to improve marketing effectiveness while minimizing your costs.
Direct mail is one of the most productive marketing communications vehicles in the world. It allows infinite variety of formats and messages; you can find mailing lists in almost any consumer or business category; and it’s a personal, powerful medium that is ideal for persuasive selling.
Have things really changed? The correct and short answer is “yes.” This should come as no surprise to any of us. The very nature of commerce across industries has evolved over the past decade, and the more recent economic upheaval also has made its mark…churning out a new breed of buyers. When you blend a diminishing pool of human resources and shrinking budgets with heightened competition and market uncertainty, the result is a broad-based shift in organizational attitudes about spending.
Making decisions about marketing investments can be frustrating, because there are so many options available. Which marketing tools
are most important? What tactics will give you the most bang for the buck? The answer to these questions depends a lot on your situation, your target audience and how they buy; not to mention your relative strengths as a marketer. But getting to the basics, there are a handful of key tools and marketing activities that every small to medium company should have. Let’s review them in turn.
Audiences today are bombarded by between 3,000 and 5,000 marketing messages per day. Cutting through this clutter to achieve your marketing objective requires a well thought out and integrated strategy to get the right message, to the right person, at the right time using a mixture of channels designed to capture attention, reinforce messaging, begin an interactive relationship with the respondent and facilitate and track response.