Marketing in a Difficult Climate is pretty much how we find ourselves in this worldwide pandemic of Covid 19, but it may not be just that, maybe you are finding it difficult to get the message out there and you are great at your work but put off by the terms, marketing, social media or email marketing. In simple terms there are customers out there who want your service or product but are not aware of you, either by never dealing with your company or you are not keeping up to date with contacting your existing clients as they grow in number. Your job then is to get them to start to hear more about you so that when they have a need, you become top of mind and they are already comfortable with your message. There are two ways this could go from here:
1/ You are an established company and you have a detailed email list already or, you are actively using your website or marketing to gain new emails.
2/ You are a new company or you have not been able to sort out gaining a workable list.
The idea of the list is to use it to Effectively target those people who have already expressed an interest in your company by regularly and lightly communicating with them. You might, for instance, be letting them know your company plan through Covid, or changing business hours, or potentially special offers. You do not have to sell every time you communicate, in fact, it is good practise to use 75:25 rule, whereby 75% of the time you are informing or giving and 25% of the time selling.
There is a buzzword used in this type of marketing called segmentation, in simple terms if you have two different products customer A might only be interested in product one and vice versa. It is of little use to offer them product two in that case. There are instances where the segmentation is not relevant (ie opening hours email) so you would send to all. But generally you would be best served keeping the data separate.
There are then questions such as how often should I be contacting my customers. This will only be relevant to your market and customers, so there is no set standard, once you set a pattern, stick to it. There will also be things like, best time of day or best day of the week. They are relevant but sending is better than not sending, and as soon as you can establish data, you can work out what is best for your circumstances. Also how do you go about gathering emails if you haven’t done it before, which is a good question. There are now strict guidelines about who you can email and you should seek advice before emailing people without their express consent. A system tied to your website will sort out the legalities for you, and usually there would be an incentive to entice people to sign up to your list. This is also an area of common abuse. Let us say your are a crafting company and you offer a draw to win a tablet device. Lots of people might want the device but have no interest in your product. You can clearly see there is no point in using this method. You may well have 10000 subscribers none of whom care a jot about reading about your latest craft product.
Create a schedule of content, what you are planning to talk about or sell, and get it done at least a few months in advance, it does make things much easier. Decide whether you are going to use the online (email) or offline (newsletter) methods and organise getting it done. The newsletter will work equally well for the emails, and you could also publish your physical newsletter onto your website, helping to keep it current. Decide where you are going to be meeting your customers, website, email, FB, Insta etc. And show up. keep the information flowing, keep a dialogue with the customers. If you need help to get started then let us know, we will do our best, and if there are items to clarify, comment below and Ill update for you.
