OK, we have to be honest; we see a lot of bad marketing out there. Bad ads, bad phone book listings, bad direct mail pieces, the list goes on. And we really want to help stop that bad marketing and turn it all into good, and hopefully great, marketing (actually, if you become a full-service client, we can pretty much guarantee we will deliver excellent marketing).

In that vein, here is a small but expanding list of do’s and don’ts based on our experiences with businesses just like yours:

Do’s

Do get all of your marketing assets – ads, brochure, Web – consistent in terms of look-and-feel and tone-and style. You don’t have that many opportunities to get your customers’ attention, and recognition is critically important. We see far too many businesses where each ad looks entirely different – it’s simply wasteful.

Do make sure you know how many visitors your Web site is getting each month. Compare that to the number of paying customers you have each month. It the Web site count is a significant percentage of real customers, it’s worthwhile making sure your Web site is up to the expectations of your customers. But, if you’re getting no traffic, don’t waste too much money on it. Bottom-line, we see too many businesses that simply don’t know how much traffic their site gets, and that’s bad marketing.

Do try and track the results of your marketing campaigns. Most business software systems (the one you use to run your business, track sales, etc) do let you capture information about where your customers first heard about you. It doesn’t have to be complicated – phone book, advertisement, referral, etc. But once you capture that data you can start to understand what level of return-on-investment your marketing is really producing.

Don’ts

Don’t use ads to deliver coupons to your existing customers! We see this a lot and it’s one heck of an expensive, and impersonal, way to reward your existing customers. Coupon books and coupons in ads should be focused on new customer acquisition.

Don’t have offers that are always the same. We see businesses that have used the same coupon or offer for years – buy one, get one 80% off. It’s not that the offer is bad necessarily, it’s that you ‘train’ your customers to wait for the offer, and in effect you’ve de-valued your product and they’ll never pay full price again. At a minimum, mix up the offers – buy one, get one half-off; buy three, get one free; whatever. And don’t be pushed around by whoever is delivering the coupon – they’ll tell you not to change it simply because they don’t want to do the work.