Sleep at Night - Have a Marketing Plan!

I met with a prospect a couple of weeks ago who called us after receiving a series of our direct marketing pieces, email newsletters and other marketing pieces. In his words, "...it was time to do some marketing..."

After our first meeting, I was excited! My client is contemplating venturing into a new market that can augment his current business (which, like others, has been hard hit by the economy). He has put together a rough pro-forma and is convinced that moving in this new direction will have an immediate, positive impact on his business. I felt this was a perfect opportunity for AlphaGraphics to help execute his marketing plan - great timing!

Unfortunately, I'm afraid we may be too late... After a few more conversations, I've discovered that his business is in a lot more trouble than I thought and we might not have the time we need for our campaign to start bearing fruit. This leaves us in a difficult situation - while there is funding to START a direct marketing campaign, is there enough to finish one? That will be the topic of our next conversation...

You may be asking, "what is the moral of this story"? What I learned is that a small business must be executing effective marketing ALL THE TIME! Marketing is not effective when it is "turned on" and "turned off". It needs to be constantly executed, evaluated and "tweaked". Additionally, effective marketing takes a lot of creative energy and time (determing your "theme", the offer, building the artwork, assembling your target list, etc). As you know, energy and time are both in short supply for small business owners...

An easy solution is to build a 12 month marketing plan! This can be as simple or as complex as you like... In our case at AlphaGraphics of Aurora, we found an MS Word calendar template and mapped out our themes and set dates for execution (mailers, email marketing, etc) for every month of the year. So far, so good - we're spending less time brainstorming what to do next and more time executing effectively. The results are paying off - we've earned 5 new customers in January and the year is just getting started!

So, help your sleep patterns by creating a marketing plan. By laying out your monthly marketing acitivites, you can spend more time in the sales and fulfillment aspects of your business AND keep growing even during the down times. Good luck!

AlphaGraphics of Aurora is a full service printing and marketing services company. Contact us at 303-261-1334 or us636@alphagraphics.com. You can learn more about us (or upload at file) at our website: us636.alphagraphics.com.