Your Business Angels - Paper and Pen are back again.

Paper and Pen are back again.

28.08.2019

Marketing – spend money on the Google “work bidding war”. Complete a number of dollar boosts with Facebook. Get buried in Instagram and Twitter.

All of these seem to me to be dark arts.

There isn’t a day that goes by where a young person who has finished their social media course wants to be “my friend” on LinkedIn and they can take care of all my needs, increase “my reach” and probably cure some disease at the same time.

I spent a lot of money with these experts going nowhere.

There is just so many messages on social media (though I have kept my Facebook to a minimum as I put Ulan Bator as my place of birth). Aren’t we all tired of being stalked when an ad follows us around?

This doesn’t mean that we don’t have a decent website. This doesn’t mean we don’t have Facebook. Lots of our business inquiries come through our website, and we leave the website to be a form of information for a prospect to get to know a bit about us.

That works, and works better since we moved away from landing pages trying to grab someone on one issue. We found giving our prospects a better chance to get to know us worked more efficiently.

We also occasionally use a boost on Facebook. Having spent a lot of money creating likes etc. Facebook wants to charge me to talk to those I paid to reach in the first place. I guess the radio station isn’t going to give me free ads because I have already reached their audience.

Paper and Pen are back again.

But I have found that writing to prospects to be an incredibly powerful tool.

Over the last few years we have been developing an accounting program, and its uniqueness means that we can approach new markets.

One market involves a set number – the 673 insolvency practitioners. We were able to obtain a list from ASIC and while we emailed our message to them, we have really begun to get traction since we created a brochure and started to write and send other mail to this group.

We’ve always been keen to write to people, and where possible hand write the envelope. If you put a bit of thought into how the envelope looks, a message on the outside that is put there with a hand stamp, then you create curiosity and there is a good chance it could be opened.

Compare this with how many emails you may delete in day. How many Facebook ads you flick by.

So in our campaign we have written twice to this group. The second time we had a lovely brochure that had a message that directly talked to a problem we could solve. We cannot be happier with the business that has begun.

Our efforts will be followed by an invitation to trial our system for free (nothing like a test drive). Then after that we will send this group a highlighter and a pencil – which are things they still need if they aren’t using our new Fintech product.

Like all marketing – the “Pen and Ink” plan needs a plan, and it needs to be well implemented.

  1. Choose who you want to talk to
  2. Get their mail address and make sure you are sending it to the right person
  3. Plan for the envelop to be something that isn’t typical and could be passed to who you want to speak to and not considered just junk.
  4. If you are creating a brochure, make it relevant and easy to read in 3 minutes – be careful of using pictures that are a cliché.
  5. Plan a letter the takes about 90 seconds to read, or if longer, have the message and benefit of what you are offering in the readers head, so that they will read on.
  6. Have an invitation where possible.
  7. Plan about 5 to 7 mail outs with a different presentation and story as you go. Our experience in radio is that it works if you never stop advertising.
  8. Make everything you do something that represents your business and you. Do it all with pride.

There is a lot of work to get this going, so make time. You may discover some of those old fashion advertising methods still work.

Serviced by related company Fresh Number Pty Ltd


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