A number of small business owners are now insourcing their marketing campaigns to reduce costs. According to a Deloitte study, nearly 7% of the surveyed companies that outsourced various components of their business outside were now planning to end the contract and move the project in-house. For small businesses, it is not always about the efficiency and cost. Many times, marketing campaigns are chosen to kept in-house because there is no specific marketing strategy or budget allocated every month to justify a dedicated team or project. If you are a small business owner, there are various tools to carry out the marketing campaigns yourself.
One of the major challenges is in publishing marketing posters at home. However, with a printer, a good quality ink cartridge and a little knowledge of PhotoShop, you could easily get started. Here are the various steps involved in getting a marketing poster done in-house.
1. The first and most important step is to conceptualize your marketing campaign. What is your objective? Are you planning a contest? Are you looking to reach out to potential customers with your contact number? Depending on your objective, decide what to showcase in your marketing banner.
2. Every marketing banner has two components - a simple and easy to understand message and a call-to-action (CTA). Without an exciting message, the call to action becomes redundant. So decide on the right message to portray. Ensure that the message conveys the whole subject with as few as 10 words - Nobody likes to read an essay on a banner.
3. Build a call to action that seamlessly follows the banner message. Create as many combinations of message & CTA as you can
4. This is the most vital part of the campaign. You will need to test what message-CTA combination works. Ideally, you should take the message to potential customers to see the combinations that get the best response. However if you are strapped of cash or time to carry out this analysis, you could take this message to your own family members or friends (who are not experts in your business niche) to give you an idea of what message combination helps them understand your marketing objective the best.
5. The next part of the campaign is designing the banner. If you are a PhotoShop newbie, do not bother creating a complex design for your banner. Keep it simple and make use of royalty free images from the internet to complement your marketing message. The internet is replete with amazing tutorials to create your own advertising banner. A simple Google search should help you with the design.
6. The penultimate step is printing the banners. If you are targeting the bulletin boards or plan to distribute them as flyers, then you could print these banners in-house at your printer. If you are looking at large banners, then it is a good idea to get them printed at a local commercial banner printer service. It doesn’t cost much and with a quality service, you can also plan to reuse the banners for multiple promotions.
7. The final step is distribution. Identify the prime spots that your customers visit - are you looking at students? Then a bulletin board at a local college or flyers outside the college premise is a good bet. Are you looking at people from an affluent neighborhood, talk to the local newspaper distributor to help you with the distribution. If your customers are in the US, you should check out the Every Door Direct Mail service offered by the USPS that helps you reach out to all customers in a particular neighborhood. It is cheap and effective.
Marketing neither needs an annual budget nor does it always need a dedicated team. Small businesses that are cash strapped can still deploy effective marketing strategies to attract new customers. Using the steps listed above, anyone can start marketing their messages for as less as a couple of hundred dollars. What are your thoughts?