'Shoestring' marketing sends out the wrong message
Written by Shirley Lichti for The Record, September 19, 2002

If I had a dollar for every time someone asked me about “marketing on a shoestring”, I could have retired long ago. So when I was asked to address a group of entrepreneurs launching new businesses on that very subject, I rolled my eyes.

While I agreed to give the talk, I balked at the title. My problem with marketing on a shoestring is that it implies that you should do things cheaply.

It suggests a mindset that sees marketing as an expense, when in fact, it needs to be seen as an investment.

Sure, you can spend as little as possible, skimp on graphic design, use a bargain basement print shop. But you’ll get exactly what you pay for and nothing more. Don’t kid yourself by thinking your potential customers won’t notice that you cut corners.

Your marketing materials reflect the image of your company. You need to bear this in mind and ask yourself what message you are really sending out.

A few years ago, a friend of mine started a computer consulting business. Someone had given him business-card software so he decided to save money and use it. Unfortunately, he thought that having a lot of different fonts would compensate for not having a logo, colour or graphic images.

He then printed the cards on letter-weight stock instead of card stock and cut them himself. To make matters worse, he used textured paper and a cheap printer, so not all the ink adhered and the text was hard to read. The end result was a very flimsy card that looked awful.

My friend was terribly proud of his business card, so it was difficult for me to tactfully tell him to throw them all out. But the cards would hurt, not help, his business.

Marketing is everything you do. It’s the quality of your business cards. It’s having well-designed brochures, ads and web sites. And it’s the professional tone in your voicemail message.

I realized, however, that the entrepreneurs I was addressing had budgetary constraints and would want to get the best bang for their advertising buck. So I titled my talk Cost Effective Communication.

Here are just a few of the tips I shared with them.

• Understand your target market. This is absolutely critical. If you don’t know your target market, how can you determine what communication vehicles and messages are best suited for reaching it?

• Plan a year’s worth of marketing activities. This will help you to be clear about your focus, goals and objectives. And when new opportunities to promote your organization come up, having a plan lets you quickly determine if they are indeed worth acting on. In addition to keeping you focused, a promotional plan helps you to budget and project the cash flow needed for implementation.

• Be consistent about your brand design and image. Advertising is all about repetition.

  There is a lot of clutter that your messages need to break through. That’s a lot harder to do if you are continually changing the look and feel of your promotional material. Invest in finding the right look early on and then stick with it.

• Think cross promotions. Simple and effective, cross promotions involve two or more organizations working together to reach potential customers. They help stretch your promotion budget because you find companies that share the same target market you do and work together to jointly promote each other’s products and services.

  For example, a store selling used clothing can distribute coupons for a local dry cleaning service to its consignees, since all the clothes it sells need to be cleaned. In return, the dry cleaner can hand out flyers promoting the consignment store.

• Register a domain name for your company even if have no immediate plans to develop a web site. This lets you to set up an email address that will never change, even if you change internet service providers. This will save you money on re-printing costs for new business cards and stationery.

  Plus you will appear more professional and credible than by using an address like bsmith657@hotmail.com.

  And lastly, you’ll never worry about clients getting their email bounced back as undeliverable because your address is no longer valid.

• Learn about the news media. Publicity can be one of the most effective tools in a company's promotional toolkit. It can have a strong impact on public awareness at a fraction of the cost of advertising.

  Understanding the basics of what constitutes news and being able to write a good news release is not rocket science. Still, it’s surprising how few companies take advantage of publicity simply because they don’t understand it.

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