What is your marketing problem? Too many times I hear stories of radio ads that didn’t get a return on investment, websites that were built for tens of thousands of dollars and they can’t tell if the site has had any impact on their business; or print ads in magazines and news papers that have meant nothing more that adding a line to their expense account.

Marketing takes a plan, a commercial takes a plan, a website takes planning, an ad campaign takes planning, and more times than not, clients come to me wanting something thrown together now that gets results now. You can’t plant a kernel of corn today and expect to harvest 90 acres overnight.

Farming is a good analogy for marketing. A farmer knows that in order to harvest 90 acres of corn, 90 acres needs to be planted… in prepared soil… at the right time… and with the right seed. For a successful marketing campaign, you have to have a very clear picture of your target audience and know what seeds to plant for them.

The biggest mistake businesses make in their marketing is to make their efforts too broad, too all encompassing. By not being specific in who you’re targeting this month, this year, in this issue, with this website, you’ll miss the whole audience.

People want to be marketed to specifically. I love the term I heard a marketing consultant say recently – permission marketing. When people give you permission to be marketed to, they’ve opened the door for you to sell them on why they need to buy from you. Permission marketing is marketing that a person wants to see, when they want to see it.

The best example of permission marketing is a web search. A person has decided they are looking for pineapple cupcakes and so they go to their computer to search the web for pineapple cupcakes in their city. A list of websites of companies that can provide pineapple cupcakes appears like magic. This consumer has just given a limited number of companies a chance to sell her something right now. I say limited because the first website she clicks on could be the winner, or she may click through a page or two of results before finding the right cupcake.

The built in bonus of permission marketing is that by opening your website the consumer has not only given you permission to market your cupcakes to her, but all of the rest of your products now have that same permission to wow her into buying something else from you too.

If the web is permission marketing, than the rest of your marketing efforts can be considered interruption marketing. You might be listening to music on the radio and then you are interrupted by advertisements. You might be reading a magazine article and then an ad interrupts your reading and the story continues on the back page. Traditional marketing principles hold that an ad needs to interrupt you 14 times before you’ll pay close attention to it and decide on whether its something you want to look into or not. How many customers would you need to gain in order to pay for 14 ads?

Permission marketing is a more efficient avenue to increase your customer base and is the way, not of the future, but the way of the world right now. There are so many newspapers disappearing every year as businesses realize that the web is a lucrative place to advertise and refocus their advertising dollars. I’ve watched magazines and newspapers that my clients place ads in shrink down to practically nothing. Before the web came along, the biggest wish of any business that spends money on marketing is that they magically could advertise only where his customers would pay attention to their ad. The web fits this profile exactly.

To find out more about creating a website that allows you a piece of the lucrative permission marketing world, call Suite 171 today at 701-478-5955 or email us at info@suite171.com.

Tags: advertising and marketing, Marketing Fargo, moorhead marketing, website marketing