Dee Blick is the U.K.’s number 1 bestselling small business marketing author and the retained Chartered Marketer for K-Seal distributors Kalimex. Her second Masterclass looks at the value of enhancing your traditional customer marketing channels:
Q. Should I stop traditional marketing and spend my money and time on social media instead?
NO! I’ve seen many businesses come unstuck when they’ve abandoned marketing tools that have worked for them and sunk their precious marketing budget into social media instead.
The fact is that only a small number of your existing customers and potential customers will be on social media and those that are do not want to be sold to. If you focus your energies purely on social media your sales will plummet. You have to use the traditional channels such as the telephone, direct mail, email marketing and PR to reach out to your target audiences.
For example, if you want to let existing customers know you’re launching a special offer you can promote this with a nice email, followed up by a phone call a few days before the offer starts. Then, on the day itself send a text message to remind them. You can build a shoestring marketing campaign targeting the professional motor mechanics in your area by finding their details through Google and then sending a nice letter with your business card and a special “new customer only” offer, followed up by a phone call.
It would be impossible to use Twitter and Facebook for this. Firstly, people don’t like to be sold to through these channels and secondly, you would only reach a tiny number of these professional motor mechanics.
Instead of looking for that marketing miracle at the end of the rainbow, mistakenly thinking it’s in the shape of social media, identify how you can improve your traditional marketing.
Part 3 in the series will look at how you can successfully implement price hikes.
