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Promotion and advertising tips for your business
Once you have identified your product and service benefits and created a
pricing strategy, it's time to develop an advertising and promotional campaign
for your target customers. You must consider the following for your campaign:
- What message do I want to convey to my prospects and customers?
- What type of advertising media is most appropriate for my business?
- How much can I afford to spend on my advertising?
Prior to answering these questions, it is important to remember that your
advertising should be directed at your target market and that it must be
continuous to be effective. If you have adequately identified your target
market, then you should have little difficulty reaching your prospects using
cost effective media. Consider a software vendor that sells accounting and
productivity applications to manufacturing businesses. Appropriate advertising
media for this vendor might include: direct mailings; trade shows; and listings
in trade journals. Also, this vendor might plan to visit the same two trade
shows every year, and conduct direct mailings to the same individuals every
quarter.
Your publicity and promotion should gradually change the awareness level of
prospective customers about your products and services. Remember your first day
of school or college, when you didn't know anyone, and only said a few brief
hellos to your fellow classmates. At the end of the week, through multiple
contacts, you knew some names and had even begun small personal relationships.
Finally, by the end of the school year you had developed full-blown friendships.
Correctly implemented, your publicity and promotion will work the same way.
Imagine a new landscaping business that has targeted local office parks as
its customers. Since the local building managers have never heard of this
business, and normally sign yearly contracts for service, the new landscaping
business might try the following:
- Place an advertisement in the phone book under landscaping.
- Call the local office parks and find out the names of the respective
building managers.
- Begin mailing letters and flyers to the building managers every 4-6 weeks.
- After the fourth mailing follow-up with a phone call to see if the
building managers my be interested in learning more about the service.
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