Marketing “pick n mix”
If you always do what you have always done...you always get what you’ve always got.
Marketing professionals beware; if you have not tried something new recently...because the recession is making us all risk averse...hoping that if we keep our heads down...we can emerge in a year or so...pretty much intact...your wrong!
You need a good healthy marketing mix of things you know work...that you can bank on...and things that are there to try new things.
Here’s why:
1. Everyone’s different – including your customers and clients. And one consequence of this is some people will respond to, say, email, whereas others might not respond until they actually hear your message in an audio file, or a CD sent to them in the post, or even personally from you on the phone. Yet others might not respond to your offers until they see a video of you on a web page. The point is, your marketing mix must include all these different media so you stand a better chance of hitting as many people as possible in their “sweet spot”.
2. Almost everyone these days is using the Internet sometimes to the exclusion of all else. And while I am a great fan of Internet marketing and think it ought to be the core marketing strategy for many businesses, the fact is it’s becoming more and more crowded – which means it’s harder and harder for your marketing to stand out. By adding different media to your marketing mix, you can get yourself seen by your target market without having to jostle with your competitors for attention at the same time.
3. Finally, it’s dangerous. Imagine if you found your best marketing strategy was cold-calling and so you never did anything else. And then one day you wake up to find it’s now illegal. What would you do then? Or say you market yourself using well-crafted Search Engine Optimisation… and then for some reason Google changes the way they index sites and yours has vanished off the listings? Or – worse – somehow your SEO expert has made a mistake and you’ve got your site blacklisted and you’re up the creek with no paddle, no website traffic and no customers!
So that’s just 3 reasons why your marketing mix is so important. There are more, but those are 3 of the main ones. So take my advice and make sure you have a proper marketing mix and are not too reliant on just one medium or approach.
