Business Marketing – Maximize Your Worth

Any business wants to keep and augment its market share, and the tactics it uses to achieve that are important. Most companies start out the same way – spotting a need and fulfilling that need by advertising to potential customers using any means necessary. Your first few meetings with customers probably were, or will be, face-to-face consultations that either developed into a regular appointment or solved a problem within the initial few meetings. As a business grows, though, an increasing amount of its custom starts to come from other businesses.

Whether your work is chiefly consultative or supply-based, business to business marketing is something that you should think about early on in the life of your business. There are various reasons for this. Companies outsource a lot of work so that they can concentrate on applying themselves to their area of expertise. They want to get someone – for a reasonable price – who will have the same level of expertise in a different area. Also, companies have by their nature larger budgets than individuals, can write off consultative work as tax-deductible and are larger entities (therefore having more needs).

Business to business marketing is also more conducive to direct mailing by its nature. A personal email address is, for many people, where they receive updates from their family and friends, or what they use to keep track of blogs or forum memberships. Receiving business emails to those addresses can be somewhat jarring, and sending to them can put in place some tricky questions about how “businesslike” you can be in your approach. Working between businesses can be liberating in this respect, as it is all the more clear that you are in a financial transaction, a quid pro quo.

Business marketing is also free from the ethical question of “cold marketing”. There can be few of us who have not hung up on a telemarketer once or twice, particularly when they call us at home. Our home address is where we live, eat and are ourselves. In the office, it is right to talk about business. Getting a phone call trying to sell you anti-virus software at 7:30 pm is another thing entirely. So it is with email and direct mail through the postal service. A lot of people feel put out by receiving marketing copy with their daily postal delivery – but if they are a business it is part of the process and less of a problem.

Whatever else you do in terms of business marketing, this does make the entire process a lot more straightforward. You can be more direct, and can be more honest about the fact that you are selling something. This is a weight off any direct marketer’s mind. If you stop and talk to someone who works as a telemarketer it is not rare to hear them say that, as this is the only job they can get, they have to simply grin and bear it when a customer is rude to them. In direct business marketing this is much less of a hazard, and this clarity is extremely welcome for any business.

How Email Has Helped Businesses Evolve

The Internet has made a major difference to the way we do business in this day and age. People who never would have considered even starting a business a decade ago are now doing just that because of the increased opportunities the Internet has offered them. A major part of this change has been the way that email works for a business, and in particular the difference between using email for direct mailing and the old way – using the postal service.

Think for a moment about how you used to treat the mail when it arrived in the morning. Any letter that looked “important” would be opened and read, while anything that was obviously marketing content would be thrown in the trash, usually without even reading it. Considering the expense of using the postal service for marketing purposes – the cost of postage, producing the marketing material etc. – this was never really a worthwhile use of time and money, but companies still did it because anything that might create repeat business was considered to be something that had to be done.

With direct mailing having become much easier due to the advent of email, those problems are in the main no longer relevant. Where before you had to pay for the materials used, and often for the design of any marketing material, typing your marketing information into an email is free of charge. Sending it is free, too, and even if a stamp is cheap and you have a deal with a postal service it can really begin to add up when you are writing to a number of people. If, as a conservative estimate, you were to say that it cost $1 per address to write, produce and send marketing material, a single mailshot to a hundred potential customers would cost $100 – less any deal for bulk.

However, as any mathematician will tell you, one hundred times zero equals zero. Therefore direct mailing using the Internet is a much more cost-effective way of getting the message out there. Given that one of the key rules of business is to keep your return on investment high, any sale which results from a direct mailing campaign using email represents a profit. It might be argued that there will be a number of people who do not read their email unless it is from someone specific – but even if someone does that, it didn’t cost any money to send them the mail so it does not represent a financial loss.

Of course, this does not mean that direct mailing will necessarily pay off. There is no doubt that there is an art to doing it correctly, and this tends to separate the successful from the unsuccessful direct mailing campaign. You need to give those customers a reason to read and react without laying it on too thick. Incentivizing repeat customers is an important consideration. This may involve offering them money off for using a particular order code, or developing a reputation for having an entertaining marketing campaign. One way or the other, if you make it work for you direct mailing can be a real money-maker.