The title of this blog is not just hyperbole (exaggeration), you know.
If you haven’t gotten the idea yet, it is time to get a clue.
Serious marketing takes work. It is not done with “a lick and a promise.”
Because you have a better mouse trap does not mean the world will beat a path to your door.
Because you’ve always done well doesn’t mean it is automatic. General Motors is in bankruptcy court, the world’s largest insurance company took billions of tax dollars to save it. The government isn’t rushing to save us small businesses.
I’m not trying to paint a grim or hopeless picture. Far from it.
Given a good product or service, a commitment and the ability to deliver as promised what you sell, viable pricing and smooth handling of leads, you still have to generate prospects in sufficient quantity.
Every week I get emails and phone calls from marketing personnel looking for jobs. If I didn’t otherwise know it, that would certainly tell me that not every company in the marketing world is thriving.
So why is thirteen05 creative doing just fine, despite the economic troubles?
We practice what we preach of course. Here’s an example:
The vast majority of our business comes from Tampa Bay, and the vast majority of our new clients come to us from the Internet, and mainly from searches.
Currently, about 10% of visitors to our website from local searches turn into leads. That is a phenomenal, almost unbelievable percentage.
It took hundreds of hours of work over several months developing a new branding for our company, new look for our website, developing unique navigation, restructuring our site, rewriting copy, studying statistics on the site, making changes, etc. etc.
All of our marketing is aimed straight at the small percentage of businesses out there that are in our exact niche: Big enough to have a marketing budget, small enough to be hands on by people to whom the survival of their business matters. Too small for office politics to be a major barrier to getting anything done. Serious about getting professional, quality marketing. They know they don’t know it all, and they are too small to have all the necessary talent in-house.
Those kinds of businessman call us up and just start gushing about our website and the samples of our work on it. The others? Who cares! There are more companies in our target market than we could possibly handle if they all found and called us today.
You can thrive and survive in these times. BUT.
GET SERIOUS ABOUT YOUR MARKETING.