Being prepared for the unexpected in your marketing
The simple fact of business is that no matter what you do, you operate at the mercy of forces outside of your control. Suppliers might go out of business or drop product lines you rely on. You might have a brand new competitor start up and offering really good deals. You might suffer some personal events that takes you away from your business, or some external event stops you operating. While all this is happening the last thing you want to think about is marketing. The reality is that in this day and age you really can’t afford not to think about it. So we are going to talk about a few simple things you can do to be prepared for the unexpected and minimise the amount of time you have to spend doing it when you rather be thinking about things
Have general marketing / promotional material on standby
We have talked about this before but it is worth repeating. You should always have a one or two general purpose marketing items or deals you can use at a moment’s notice. General range deals or percentage off is always the best standby as it’s not tied into any one service or product which many not be available at the time you have to use the promotion. A general marketing item is always great to have as well, the reminder of a service or range you offer that in lesser demand because people don’t know you have it.
Have both physical and electronic versions of your marketing material
Now the natural response for many business when they have do some unplanned marketing is to throw something on a social media post, web site update, or email message. While that is good, given the huge volume of e-marketing that lands in people’s email boxes theses days, unless it’s a very attractive deal, you’ll end up being deleted with all the rest of the ‘spam’. A more effective idea is to make the electronic version be a teaser, drawing people to your website where you can go into more detail, or to let them know that the deal will be appearing in the post box. Or you can do the other way and send out a physical mail item and direct them to a special that can only access thanks to a coupon code on flyer.
Social media is a low effort way of getting things out to existing clients
If you need a quick method to get a bit of marketing out, social medial is a great tool. Now unless you have a deal or post that has a viral quality, what you are putting out there will only hit your existing followers so tailor it to them first. Using Facebook as an example, if you operate under a business account you can set up promotions with coupons that have either a limited number available or everyone can get. You can also pay for your promotion to be put on everyone’s feed covering a given area. Now a if you have your marketing prepared beforehand, then the process of getting it out electronically will take only a few minutes.
Have backup ways of doing marketing
If you can’t get to your office, or the computer that holds all your marketing goes belly up, then you have a problem. In this day and age, it’s no problem to have backups of important files in ‘the cloud’ via online storage systems like dropbox or google drive. This means that you can still access it and put it to use as long you can borrow a computer or have a smartphone and a internet connection. For physical marketing material like flyers it’s not that much extra cost to have a couple of thousand units printed and have them packed in a couple of boxes in a closets at home ready to grab and use when needed.
Make use of Copy Express
Why not make use of us. We keep electronic copies of all your marketing material on our systems for a period of time so it’s easy enough for us to take care of it for you not matter if it’s getting physical items printed and distributed or coming up with some posts for you to upload onto your feeds. Just tell us what you need to have done and we will take care of it for you.
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