Marketing: Put Your Communication Strategy First

Marketing is more than placing an ad in a circular, sending out a brilliant piece of direct mail, or cold-calling clients about your product or service. While those are great things to be doing for your small business, embracing your marketing as a total communication strategy is even more effective.

Here’s why: 

Convincing your patrons to respond has become a little more time-intensive. They’re not so eager to just act on a good tag line. They want to know who they’re doing business with, and they need to know they can trust you.

But that’s the thing. No one really knows they can trust anybody. What you need to know is how to manage perceived trust. Perceived trust isn’t established easily or overnight, but it can be achieved with ‘ISYOT.’ I See You Out There is a way to look at effective brand recognition. We’re not as quick to buy from those we’re unfamiliar with. Recognition feeds trust, that’s why a strong web presence is so important. It’s much easier to develop an ISYOT presence online using iPhones, iPads, Kindle Fire, and others like them.

Still, it’s not a quick thing, and it will take a diligent effort.

How does communication strategy relate to your online presence?

Marketing is all about strategy, but adding the component of communication ups the game. The only way to be effective – and by that I mean not work 24 / 7 and still do a great job for your clients – is to come up with a strategy that gets people talking. Automation will really help. Tools like HootSuite, SocialOomph and Ping.fm make it easy to get messages out to many places at one time.

Learn how to be effective in these areas:

• YouTube
• Twitter
• Facebook Business Pages
• Blogging
• Commenting on industry blogs
• Article marketing
• Networking
• Online press release

Seem impossible? It’s really not, if you go about it strategically. Use an egg timer and Excel, schedule your email posts and status updates – know what time is going where, and track everything from passwords to returned responses. Track for at least 60 days to see what works for your company, and where you can improve your efforts. Taking a couple of hours a week on this will help familiarize a public audience with your brand.

All your direct response mail, advertisements, and trade show event marketing improves when people know who you represent, what they can expect from your company, and ultimately – what they can expect from you.

When you focus on developing a trustworthy reputation through marketing, communication, and  strategy, you’ll be where you need to be when customers are looking for you.

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