Revision of Week 4 from Wed, 2011-01-05 10:57

Week 4: Direct mail, email, public relations, and more

Objectives:

• To understand a variety of promotional marketing tools
• To analyze which tools might be most effective for your enterprise

Readings:

Assignments:Make-your-own-case study:

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This week we're going to look at promotion or lead generation techniques -- how you get potential customers to know about your enterprise in the first place.

First, to maximize the benefits of any of these tools, you may want to consider some kind of customer database. Depending on your business, this could be as simple as list of customers in Outlook, a spreadsheet, or even on paper, or as complex as a full-blown contact and customers relation management system. Whle this might seem overblown for a start-up enterprise, it is very  useful for a variety of purposes including measure the effectiveness of various marketing efforts, lead tracking, on-going marketing, tracking repeat business and referrals, managing support, etc.

Whatever promotion tools you use, try to focus on adding value to the customer. Most people don't love in-your-face advertising, but we all like good solutions to real problems we have. Try to frame your promotional

Here are some options for promotion. Which work best for you will depend largely on your enterprise.

Direct mail
Direct mail can be expensive, and most think of it as a tool for larger enterprises. However, targeted direct mail can be enormouslly successful for small enterprises. Examples of targeted direct mail campaigns might be letters to very large or very influential potential customers.

Email
Email is free, making it very appealing to small enterprises, but please do not spam! Spamming is sending unsolicited mass emails. Not only is spam discourteouus but it will ultimately harm your enterprise's reputation.
Productiove approaches to email marketing include:

• Build an opt-in email list - This is not as hard as it sounds, and it is a key to email marketing success. Collect email addresses everywhere you go. Include a "subscribe"  link on web site and anywere you promote yourself.
• Include valuable content for your target audience in every email communication. Examples could include articlesor links on topics of interest, support tips, discounts, contests, success stories, etc.
• Include an "unsubscribe" option on all mass email communications (which is another reason you need a customer database)

Public relations
Public relations (PR) has the advantages of being basically free, not annoying to anyone, and very effective. The keys to good PR are putting together a solid list of well-targeted publications, cultivating relationships with publication editors, producing periodic interesting press releases, and following up.

Advertising
There are many venues for advertising, such as print, radio, television, billboards, online etc., and again this is typically a technique used by larger enterprises with big budgets. However, like direct mail, advertising can be effective if it can be very targeted. For example, if you have a very local business, advertising in local newspapers may make sense. Or if you have a very specific target audience (e.g. oil rig workers) and there is a publication that is very targeted to that audience, advertising may be worthwhile.

A subset of  advertisingis Google AdWords, which can be purchased to tie your promotion in to searches people do on Google.

For all of these promotion options, analyze which makes sense for your business based on the cost compared to the business they bring in. Do your best to track specific business that comes in to what generated the lead. Ask new contacts how they heard about you. Set up specialized tracking mechanisms (for example, code different direct mail pieces or use customized URLs or shortened URLs such as through Goo.gl to track impressions).