Kelley Fujino
Marketing & Industry Awareness Committee Member
Lubbock Electric Co.
What is the most valuable resource that your business can never make, buy or recruit more of? Time! This is especially true for busy EASAns that are simultaneously CEO, COO and CMO (chief marketing officer) for their companies. Here are five tactics that you can implement quickly and easily when you need to move the needle in a short period of time.
Target Existing and Former Customers
Existing and former customers are your best audience. Identify customers who have not done much business with your company in the past year and send them a promotional offer on a product or service. This can lead to upselling or cross-selling opportunities, like a discount on on-site vibration analysis. For the strongest response, it is best to target your customers in more than one way. Start by sending a mailing piece followed by a couple of emails and finally a personal call.
Host a Customer Appreciation Event
Who can say no to a party with free food and a great raffle prize? Organize a fun event at your service center for your most loyal customers or potential clients with whom you want to do more business and give them a tour of your facility. This is a great way to demonstrate new products, show off your repair capabilities or announce your company’s EASA Accreditation.
Launch a Direct Mailing Campaign to a Targeted List
Did you know that direct mailing companies can help you target your ideal prospects? They work with you to build contact lists based on parameters you set, such as location, company size/revenue, industry type and even job title of the contact person. Once the list is curated to your liking, you may purchase it for all the details. You can reuse this list for follow-up and subsequent campaigns as needed. It is important to note that list quality degrades over time as companies go out of business, contacts change jobs and so on. The list may only be 60 percent accurate the following year.
Alternatively, you can “rent” the list at a much lower rate to send your mailing pieces. You won’t know exactly who will receive your mail piece, but the list data will have been updated when you rent the same list again in the future. This is a good option when you will only use the list a few times in a year.
Try Your Hand at Social Media Advertising
Advertising on social media is easier than you might think. It can be very effective thanks to the advanced audience targeting those social media platforms offer. On LinkedIn, you can target by location, company size, industry, education, job function, job title, seniority and interests. Facebook also offers company and job-related targeting on top of behavior-related targeting such as purchasing behavior. You can set daily or total budgets for your campaign to control the costs.
Your campaign can be further enhanced with retargeting, a tactic by which you serve social media ads to people who visited your
website. As with any marketing campaign, you must begin with a clear objective and a compelling call-to-action. Are you trying to grow your follower base or capture new customer leads? Social media platforms offer guides to help you set up your campaign when you are ready to begin.
Repurpose Existing Content
Don’t let your internal content or articles collect dust on a shelf! Repost content to your social media accounts to get it circulated online. You can even reuse material from your articles to create infographics and videos. Your videos do not need to have advanced editing or graphics to be effective. Imperfections are forgivable and can humanize your business. Make sure to get good quality audio and lighting wherever you shoot. Also, make more than one video to maximize your time and resources. Short and long-form versions of your video content can be used in unique ways since people consume media differently. Some people prefer to get answers in a quick video or infographic and others may want a more in-depth explanation in an e-book or longer video.
Don’t Neglect Your Long-Term Marketing Strategy
These are examples of short-term marketing tactics that are focused on producing revenue-centric outcomes in a short period of time. Long-term marketing is focused on driving growth at the top of your sales funnel and producing non-revenue centric outcomes that pay off in the long run. When a short-term campaign brings in new business, it becomes very tempting to focus marketing efforts entirely on short-term promotional pushes. Don’t let this come at the expense of long-term marketing strategy. Continue playing the long game of customer data management, website development, content creation, search engine optimization (SEO) and brand strategy.
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