Have you tried various forms of cost-effective marketing and do you know how to use them effectively so that you get the maximum results? Are your campaigns planned carefully, or do you just passively react to the special offers of ad sellers?

What if there was a way to measure what worked and what didn’t so that you could base your decisions on real facts?

So what do you need if you want to boost your advertising and direct mail?

• A list of activities pertinent to your and customers you are trying to reach
• A simple outline of how and when to do each marketing activity that will deliver the results you desire
• A methodology to measure all of your marketing activities so that you can easily see what brings you the best results

You can now start to implement your marketing plan and see the real results as they happen.

1. Appropriate Structure
There is a special 4mat you should use for all your marketing materials. By answering these 4 questions in this specific order, you will be able to attract the most of customers:

• Why? Give them a reason to read more/contact you etc.
• What? Tell them what the benefits of your products are.
• How? Explain clearly how they can get the benefits.
• What..if? Show them what happens/does not happen if they contact you now.

If you manage to merge all these using a bit of creativity, you will create a marketing piece that will not only attract customers, but they will start to really want to buy your products!

2. Enticing Graphic Design
Unless you are a professional graphic designer yourself, it is always a good idea to have these items (or at least the most important ones) designed by a creative professional who will make sure that the colours match well; they will pick a combination of fonts that best reflect your company’s style, and give you lots of creative ideas you can then use effectively – don’t worry, these services don’t need to be as expensive as they might seem at the first sight.

3. Killer Headline
your business owners quite often ask themselves, “Why do I get no responses from my adverts?” Some of the responses you would get from a marketing expert might include the following;

• Your ad was too small!
• You should have used colour!
• You needed a better design to show it off!
• Your logo is wrong!
• Too much copy!
• Too little copy!
• Call to action was not clear enough!
• Etc.

They could all be right, and most of them could have helped somewhat, to your marketing effectiveness. But the real thing that pulls a response, once you are addressing the correct target market is the headline!

By showing them what they stand to gain from giving you the referral!

I would suggest that you have a conversation with your customer, when you have just confirmed that they are happy with your product, along the following lines:

• What specifically did you like about our products?
• Why did you choose us in the end?
• What did our solution enable you to really achieve?
• How do you believe you would put a value on that?
• And what precisely would that value be?
• How long did it take you to get that value?
• Who are the first three friends that come to your mind when you think about people who could benefit from this service in the same way as you did?
• Would they be happy if you told them about us?

Even though partnerships are even less predictable than advertising or direct mail, try to outline your expectations beforehand.

Remember, although you probably won’t spend much money on sourcing profitable partners, it will definitely cost you a lot of your time and effort. That’s why it’s important to put down what you expect to achieve from it.

Now make sure you start building your list and let the whole magic of profitable partnerships happen.

1. Setting Goals and Measuring Advertising Effectiveness
Before you dive deeper into ad creation and all that fun part of your marketing, always make sure you set goals for the individual campaigns first, so that you can measure the effect of any activity and see how it worked. In future, you will then be able to make a qualified decision whether to repeat it or not.

2. Aiming at the Right Target Market
For advertising to be effective it needs to be directly targeted at people who will respond to the advert with an action that will eventually lead to a sale. Do not listen to sellers of ad space who argue that if you take an advert out on the radio there is a good chance your buyers might hear it. We can guarantee that 99.9% of people hearing your ads will not be interested.

Therefore, be very keen at planning your marketing forward and to deciding yourself where you will be investing your advertising budget – remember your watering holes?

3. Powerful Content
Another thing to always remember is that “Content is King” which means the content of all your marketing collateral must provide solutions to customers’ problems and/or respond strongly to their desires.

So how can you make sure that when customers get to any of your marketing materials, they will find what they are looking for?

1. Speak the language of customers
2. Impress them with messages they relate to
3. Use a clear “Call to Action” – tell them what to do next – clearly!
4. Use testimonials from real customers wherever you can

Have you ever heard of Guerrilla Marketing? It’s an effective way of marketing execution for mostly small businesses but its techniques can be applied in huge corporations as well.

One of  its 15 main rules according to the founder Jay Conrad Levinson sounds as follows:

“You can actually double your profits by  measuring the results of your marketing. Some weapons hit bullseyes. Others miss the target. Unless you measure, you won’t know which are which.“

That’s why we are also keen on measurement. Above all, the advertising is an
area where the effectiveness (or efficiency?) of its spending is being widely discussed.

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