It’s mostly simple

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The most frequent advertising question I hear is, “what should I be doing?”

My answer, almost every time is, “something.”

Rather than digress into what venue for promotion works the best, gets the best ROI or trying to measure marketing investments by some other metric, I think the first thing to do is cover the basics. Generally speaking, this is also the least expensive and most cost effective way to build your business.

Do you have a mailing list? Do you contact your list on a regular basis? If you do, when you do send something to your list, is it important? Compelling? Interesting?

Are you using the net? Do you advertise there? What about your web site? Is it up to date? Do you regularly update it? Does it accurately reflect your business? generally speaking, net marketing can be some of the most effective and most overlooked out there, still, in 2007. Ten years ago ignoring the net was just not being a leader, now, it’s clearly putting you behind most everyone else.

Because of the type of market that Lancaster is sales and service follow-ups are also critical. You need to absolutely capitalize on everyone contact with a customer and use that contact firmly establish that your business is the unquestioned go-to source for whatever it is you do and there is no better time than when you are actually in the process of conducting business. Do you send out “thank you” cards to customers? Do you check back with established customers to tell them about new products and services? What about long term follow-up? Executing tasks like these will not only make your customer feel special (beause they are) but it will firmly esconce you in their minds in a postive manner. It leads to referrals and additional sales.

So before you take advantage of some exciting new promotional opportunity in one of the more traditional media, make sure you’re doing all these basic things perfectly. Then look to expand further with investing inother advertising.

12:04 am May 18, 2007 | Filed Under marketing thoughts 

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