There Are No “New” Methods for Marketing Your Business

The methodical approach to marketing remains the same since the dawn of the advertising age. You develop a product, research the demand, define your ideal customer, determine where they hang out and take aim.

First, you have to steady your trigger hand. The best way to ease your virgin advertising jitters is to study what has worked in the past. Visit Amazon.com, and type in the words marketing and advertising.

As of today, my search results displayed items 1 – 16 of 48,377 possible results.

Out of those 48K+ I guarantee there is a single publication that focuses on your product, niche or service. Find yourself a used copy for $.01 and buy it! Don’t pen a single letter of your website content, Facebook status or newspaper ad until you’ve read that book from cover to cover. You have to understand what marketing methods have been successful, and which have failed miserably.

Research is the most critical step when implementing a marketing or ad campaign designed to make you disgustingly rich! Don’t start building your business without it.

Second, define your ideal customer. How could you possibly sell your product or service, without being able to accurately describe the person who’s looking to buy it?

Who is your ideal customer?”

I pose this question at the beginning of every marketing consultation. If a business owner fails to answer my “riddle” in a timely fashion, I’ve just uncovered the biggest flaw in their approach to building a successful business.

Determine age, sex, location, hobbies, married, divorced, nationality, number of children, internet user, smartphone owner, what type of car they drive……all of this information is necessary if you want to experience a huge return on your marketing investment.

Next, and the only part of a successful marketing equation that has some flex, is the media outlet you choose to embrace as your soap box. The first two steps are concrete, but in 2013, you have email, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, radio, podcasts, text messages, mobile apps, website, blog, television and a gauntlet of other options to promote your brand. Your ideal customer research will have revealed the level of technological know-how of your audience.

For example, if you are in the business of installing home security systems, and after a year of market research, you find that your ideal customer is a single woman who lives alone, between the ages of 55-72, and earn $35-48K annually, they live in rural areas on an average acreage of 3.5.

You have safeguarded $2,500 for the first quarter’s ad budget. Social media has been a hot topic on the web, and has been promoted as the “ultimate” marketing tool. Some hot-shot guru told you that if you’re not on Facebook, you’re nowhere!

STOP! Examine your research. Your narrowly defined customer is at an age where they are using Facebook to communicate with friends and family, but still question the legitimacy of everything they read on the web. However, they trust whole heartedly in the content they absorb through the local paper. They’ve grown up reading the city rag, and if an ad is good enough for the paper, well….it’s good enough for them.

The success of your efforts to promote your business depend 100% on the perception, attraction and trustworthiness of your message. You could have the cure to cancer in your back pocket, and not a single person will care if they perceive it as fake or a scam.

Leverage the ideals and morals of your audience and build trust quickly! Established trust results in increased sales…PERIOD.

Back to the title of this post, there are no “new” methods for marketing your business.

There are new places to host your declaration, but the methods in which you get there remain the same. People spend money for the same reasons today as they did a hundred years ago.

Don’t try to change it.

P.S. Don’t forget to secure your seat for our marketing seminar on the 24th and 25th of June from 6-8PM. The seminar will held in the large conference room inside the Clinton Area Chamber of Commerce building on the south end of Second Street in Clinton, IA. Click on the Live Event tab on the top left corner of this webpage. ~Andy “The Marketing Guy”

photo credit: ~SWIFTY~DE~LA~FRONTERA~ via photopin cc