Spice up your marketing mix with your own magazine!
1. Spice up your marketing mix with your own magazine!
With all the crap filling up our inboxes and search engines, how do you pitch your brand above
the white noise?
Advertising used to be so easy! Figure out what last year’s costs to find new customers were
and create a budget either more or less depending on whether it was a good or bad year. Then
throw your budget at an ad agency that had plush seats in the waiting foyer. Theory was they
would leverage their industry know-how and contacts to get you the best deals for ads in TV,
radio or print.
Phone directories made life even easier. Yellow Pages famously moved across countries with
their light-house approach of flooding markets nationwide with sales calls and door-knockers
who convinced the business that if they did not list they might as well take the year off.
Everyone else is in, you don’t really have a choice. Simple and mostly effective.
When we launched our own full colour tabloid in 2004 with a circulation of 35,000 we were
competing with 8 other free street publications, 4 commercial TV stations, 4 commercial radio
stations, the national phone directory, junk-mail and a long tail of smaller promotional
opportunities such as direct mail. Life was simple! You sat with the business and determined if
your own media, (in our case the world’s first newspaper written entirely by the readers with
high content to advertising ratios, a real read) was the best match for their business. Every
month I had to sell $25k+ just to stay in business.
Today advertising costs have supposedly halved and performance metrics are just phenomenal.
Marketing has never been cheaper and easier, if you know when and where to spend, what
funnels to channel into what goals and how to tweak all this for better results each week.
Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest, Blogs, Press Releases, Article Directories, e-Mailouts,
pods etc. are all hungry beasts that require regular feeding, which would be fine if you didn’t
actually have a business to run.
So you outsource it to a guy in India who has no genuine feel for your business nor a natural
command of English, along with your competitors who were also convinced at some BBQ that
this was a smart Do-it-Yourself approach to breaking into new media and getting ahead. Very
quickly you’re just part of the new wave of white noise, hum-drumming along with the rest of
your competitors, using the same “we work harder for your business” taglines and tweets.
So how does a smart business today find its audience in this cacophony? Well, you look at
what the very biggest, most successful companies are doing, and you copy them as far as
possible within the resources you have. It’s no accident they’re succeeding.
Some tips for a healthy marketing mix for small to medium size businesses:
1. Get online – that’s just obvious today, and I don’t care if you’re a local mechanic
whose never touched a computer, you need a business website. Over 60% of all
1/3
2. purchases now in the Western world involve pre-purchase online research, from
handbags to boats. If you don’t have a website, you better be selling door-to-door.
2. If you don’t have a full-time social media staffer on board, don’t bother with the
Facebook and the Twitters. Getting new ‘friends’ or a new ‘like’ is only the beginning.
Have you ever tried to start an interest club, a committee… a social movement? Sure,
people might show up for the free canapés at the launch, but you’ll be lucky to see 10%
of them back again the following week. What percentage of your customers do you think
actually consider finding your Facebook page when they get online in front of the TV that
night, so that they can give you a ‘like’ for the pretty arrangement of flowers they
bought from you that morning?
3. Get local. Make sure Google knows where your business is and your catchment. Include
local keywords in your website or any articles, unless you are serving a world market.
4. Join some Linkedin groups. Members will share similar professional interests and
perhaps even some solid leads. The right groups can be good fun.
5. Hunt down all the local online directories or free classifieds (this includes Ebay) and list
your stuff. Not only does this create ‘backlinks’ from other websites to your site,
someone might actually find you and pick up the phone!
6. Invest in at least minimal Search Engine Optimisation to make sure your website is
clean and optimised and that you have at least a fighting chance of being found in some
general searches.
7. Start publishing. For the more enterprising, starting an online and even later print
magazine can produce tremendous results. You don’t have to be a large accounting
firm or insurance company to produce a magazine, and the credibility this marketing
brings to your brand is unrivaled by any other marketing strategy.
Hook up with stakeholders, whether that is the business next door in a shopping mall or
someone on the other side of the planet who makes the moulds for the boats you sell. Even
businesses exactly the same as yours but servicing different territories can be invaluable
‘marketing partners’. Launch a magazine-type website that invites stakeholder contributions
and articles or comments from your customers. Promote this site on all your paraphernalia, from
business cards to brochures. Get your marketing partners to do the same.
Augment your membership driven content with some automated RSS feeds from key industry
bodies or profiles and you will quickly hit the radar of many potential customers. As traffic and
interest gathers for your magazine site, you will be able to offer your partners advertising spots
across the site and in your automated newsletters. Customers will tell others about you when
you publish their article or feedback, because everyone likes a few minutes of fame.
Newspapers and magazines have always held a prestigious position in public opinion. To run
your own industry publication creates an immediate air of authority that is quite simply lacking in
Facebook, Twitter and other social media marketing platforms. You will not find a stronger forum
or medium to build brand than your own industry magazine.
EzyMedia builds corporate magazine websites, as well as provides ad design and page layout
for businesses that want to take the next step in looking and feeling like a magazine, in print or
online page-flipper format only.
2/3
