Marketing on a Shoestring

Here's 3 ideas for effective marketing on a shoestring:

1. Instead of printing stationery, invest in a decent colour printer and develop Word templates for your letterhead and envelopes. Be sure to set your margins and set up your styles to ensure no one uses lime green Comic Sans for headlines :-). Purchase decent paper and use in tray 2. This will save you money in the long run, plus there will be much less waste.

2. Share your direct mail list with another marketing person that isn't a competitor, but sells to the same target, e.g., let's say you sell classroom-based software training. Find a company that provides user interface design, or an accounting firm that specializes in audits/tax issues for software development companies. You'd be surprised how many organizations will do this. I've done this three ways to my partners - provided a comma-delimited text file, an Excel spreadsheet, and printed labels. Usually we pony up the same number of names... 2,500 or 25,000 depending on the range of the partner's opportunities.

3. Make your marketing program web-centric. Provide all content in HTML and in PDF format. Upload all of your sales literature as PDF and make available on-line. When a call comes in to your call center, sales guy, etc., have him/her ask if the caller is in front of a computer, and if so, ask them to visit your web site. Lead the caller through to the appropriate place on the site to download information they've requested. This has a lot of benefits:

a. immediate response to your content (both web navigation and print materials). If you have holes in your content, or the person cannot quickly find the desired information, your sales department can provide this feedback and allow you to improve it.

b. immediate ability to either close or respond to negative feedback (which is good for marketing to know as well).

c. set up an HTML page where staff can select sales literature like product data sheets, download it and print on your colour printer. This enables your staff to print sales literature only when needed - minimal waste, no storage required, available 24/7 to reps on the road, provides version control (quick updating at little cost), and no client software required, just internet access and a free acrobat reader plug-in.