ForumsAdvertising, Sales and Marketing

Creative Services Agency for Small Businesses.
What kind of marketing material, if any, do you use to attract new business

Start by knowing how the customer makes money.
Learn the customers decision making policies.
Build a relationship with the customer.
Focus on the customers business needs

How much does your business spend on marketing??.
Whatever it takes to make the customer happy.

LUCKIEST

I would suggest looking at design annuals from HOW or even better Communication Arts. Look secifically under self-promotion. There are some really good starting points here. The idea behind self promotion is to showcase what makes you different. Use tha difference to stand out. Frankly, traditional brochures are a good follow up piece, but I would suggest doing something that really stands out as an initial introductory piece. I would offer suggestions, but I don't know enough about your company, services, or market.

Me I send new/potential clients mugs and cocoa. But that ties into my branding.

Jac - Hot Cocoa Creative

What works best really varies by company. There are some types of marketing that work well for one demographic but not another. With each of my clients, we go through a discovery phase to reveal the target audience and then design based on our findings. Every time that a direct mail piece, for example, goes out we use two different messages and then analyze the results. Then we keep the better of the two and bring in a new second message. The key is to always continue testing - your message, your graphics, even the style (self mailer vs. #10 envelope).

I can tell you that for my company I use self mailers with clean, catchy text and graphics along with a gift that compliments my message.

If you want to discuss more, let me know!

-Kimberly
Worldwide Solutions

As you are in the marketing/advertising /pr industry, you would be familiar with push and pull strategies for increasing market share. A sales brochues is an effective pulling tactic but its effectiveness is dependent on a multitude of variables.
The greatest cost effective marketing tool a small business has is the web.
Have you considered expanding your realm of activities to encompass emarketing?

I have written an article addressing this topic exactly. I believe it is so important to have marketing materials and invest in marketing and here's why www.mktg.com.au/blog

Feel free to contact me if you have any queries

Agreed. We just have to get the word out on the importance!

Ahh everyone seems to like that one on my blog. Ive had a lot of people read it and even people link it. It is true though, many people want to be the most popular girl in school and many people want to do marketing but they are not necessarily cut out for it - it just seems glamourous and as I wrote: fun! fun! fun!
For those of us who do it and do it well, marketing is hard work!

You need to be extremely careful using institutional advertising (such as brochures...etc.). I've run dozens and dozens of tests with clients and the institutional ads proved to have the lowest ROI...

You should stick with direct advertising which strikes a chord with the market. Boost your response rate from your advertising, spend less to get the same results because of the higher ROI.

They key to knowing what you are doing with your advertising campaigns is to have all of your metrics done before hand:

• What is the value of single prospect to your company?

• How much is a single client/customer worth over their lifetime?

• What's your retention rates for customers/clients?

Get your metrics down and then you can say:

"Ok for every prospect that contacts our company they are worth $xxxx because Y% of them become customers and each customer has a life-time value of $ZZZZ. So I know that I can spend _____ amount to attract a new prospect and turn ____ profit from each and every one of them."

It's scientific, if you aren't looking at it that way you're losing money via profit leaks.

To Higher Profits,
Dave Ryan, Consultant
Higher Profits Marketing
higherprofitsmarketing.com