Small Business Marketing Guide - DIY (do-it-yourself) BRAND MARKETING STRATEGIES to HELP YOU GROW YOUR BUSINESS

No matter what you want to call it — direct mail, junk mail, circulars, ads, or spam — they all share the same purpose: to motivate you to buy from them. While a lot of what is out there may actually be junk, a savvy direct marketer inspires the recipient to read their ad.

Unlike your brand, which will tell the customer what to think, your marketing strategy must tell them what to do. Before you can effectively do that, you need to know how.

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One of the classic mistakes many marketers make is to assume that potential customers inherently care about their company or the product they have to sell. It may sound harsh, but the fact of the matter is that they just don’t. Most customers don’t care about you, your product, your exciting young company or what you have to say.

What do they care about? Solving some problem or meeting some need of their own. But increasingly, they also care about doing business with companies that care about them.

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If you click on the “Direct Marketing Strategies” tab, you’ll see a ton of great advice on how to boost your revenues through direct marketing.  Here’s an Editor’s Roundup of some of the hottest direct marketing tips from our group of small business marketing experts.

CRAFT A MESSAGE: Joe Costantino offers six rules for creating an effective direct marketing message.

Before you can embark on your direct marketing journey, you have to figure out what message you want to send and what action you want prospects to take. It’s important to remember that people won’t know why they should buy from you unless you tell them.

GET RESPONSE: Anita Campbell outlines four ways to get a high response from your direct marketing efforts.

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Even during the best of times, it’s far more costly to acquire a new customer than it is to keep an existing one. But during a recession? The disparity can become monumental as cash-strapped potential buyers hold their wallets close in their efforts to save money.

Each lost customer, meanwhile, is a step closer to disaster for small businesses. So it’s more important than ever to do everything you can to hang onto the customers who have already chosen to buy from you before. It’s time to count your blessings, in other words, and do what you can to keep them. And that, in turn, is where direct marketing can help.

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Gut reaction to Direct Marketing ~ makes me think of the things that appear in my physical mailbox and my digital one. In trying to figure out what to tell you this week, i noticed something when i went to grab a glass of orange juice from the fridge… the BEST random mailers i get seem to end up on my fridge. In from the mailbox, played with a bit at the table, and then either trashed/recycled or there they go ~ magnet grasped onto the fridge like works of art (keep in mind i’m 26 and kidless, so the fridge is more filled with tetris magnets and random snippets that inspire me versus fingerpainting masterpieces).

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