I can almost hear your sharp intake of breath as you read the title. Surely marketing is a massive drain on a company’s resources, particularly its cash?

Firstly, marketing should be looked upon as an investment which should pay back 2, 3 or more times the investment.

Secondly, many companies try so many different marketing techniques and tactics. They’re looking for the silver bullet that will nail the customers they want. Or they simply try and keep up with the same marketing everyone does in their industry.

As Jay Abraham might say, “that’s just dumb, dumb, dumb..!”

Marketing Like Everyone Else

Maybe you’re wondering what’s so wrong with using the same marketing tactics as everyone else in your industry to get customers. After all “if it works for them why wouldn’t it work for me?” is the thought that crosses many business owners minds.

Think about this …

If you’re using the same tactics as everyone else you’ll get a proportion of the available market because your customers will see a fairly homogenous mass of suppliers who’ll they’ll have difficulty differentiating between. And that will be that. You’ll find it difficult to grow because everyone uses the same tactics and the customer pie is looked at in the same way by everyone.

And of course you worry that if you try a different tactic it might not work and that would cost you money and possibly you’ll be embarrassed at the next association meeting when everyone laughs and points at you for thinking such a marketing method could work!

Marketing Differently

And yet, if you did market differently in some way you’d immediately stand out from the crowd.

And by standing out from the crowd you’re noticed and being noticed is part way to get yourself new customers.

There’s no doubt that marketing differently means trying things that aren’t standard in your industry.

And because they’re different they may not work immediately. And even after a tune-up they still may not work. Finding that out means you know what doesn’t work and you can go on and try another thing that is different to your competitors and may suddenly bring you an avalanche of customers.

And if a new method works…

You’re the only one using it. Every customer you get through the new method is being drawn from the pool of customers from your industry and they aren’t deciding whether you’re marginally better than all the rest, because your marketing method has pointed just to you.

Marketing For No Cost

You can do a lot of guerilla marketing, which is low or no cost marketing. Although again if you’re not careful you end up with a load of tactics that don’t work well together.

Better is to stand back from your business, decide your business and marketing strategy and pick the tools and tactics you want to use. And those tools and tactics can be the ones you use now. The only difference may be that you integrate them to provide a consistency to your marketing.

So that means rather than each marketing component running separately you make sure that the sales letters, web sites and other copy use customer testimonials and PR that’s appeared in the media. PR uses some of the research that marketing has conducted through web or phone surveys. And so on. So that each component feeds all the others which makes the whole marketing message much stronger.

Feeding between different aspects of marketing is a no-cost way of getting better marketing.

Other no cost ways of marketing are to use the power of the PR, run a company blog, write customer emails, write a book or series of articles or phone customers to deepen rapport with them.

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