Know-How Exchange : Strategy

For the City of 5 Seasons:

+E-mail marketing
+Cold calling accounts in person
+Telephone calling>>>try to allow your sales people to call from home to keep telephone rates to a minimum

Direct contact with potential customers is always the most effective way.

Warren,

You have to be more specific.What are you sales channels now?What is your target group? How have you been winning your customers so far?How many loyal customers do you have?
How do you work with them? Have you tried to cross-sell / up-sell to them?Do you know their individual needs and requirements so that you could come up with better solutions to their problems?What is your direct competition doing? Do you think that in some aspect of your business you are doing better than they are?Which one is it? What are your real strong points and weaknesses?

Rgds

Adam

Hi Warren,

1) Develop and implement an e-newsletter to send to your
existing customers. 80% of your business is probably coming from 20% of your customers, and 80% of them are probably only buying 20% of what they could be if you used email marketing to stay in consistent and constant contact using specials and other value-added information to drive them either to your store or to your website.

Don't direct people to your home page. Once you develop your email marketing campaign, develop landing page(s) to support it.

Encourage them to forward your email marketing to people they know who also might benefit from them.

2) ) Develop a new website in large part to support your email marketing. Get rid of the loading and splash page.

Find a local freelance person, they will charge you about 1/4 of what a web development company will. Don't go crazy with it, you just need more than you currently have because your current site adds little value and you could benefit just by giving it a new look and beefing up your content.

3) You might want to look at local search and even a geo-targeted Google pay-per-click, targeting Iowa, Southern Wisconsin and Northern Illinois. Local search is free and geo-targeted PPC ads can be very cost effective, it is definitely worth looking into.

A caveat, Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing are not as simple as they will lead you to believe, you do need to understand how to make them "work" so this will either involve a learning curve on your part or hiring a PPC expert. Again, look for inexpensive local talent.

Good marketing doesn't have to cost a lot, but you do need to spend something and you need to plan and strategize it so that your components leverage and provide a synergy with each other. This is smart marketing and is how you get the most bang for your buck.

I hope that helps.