I love it when people make pronouncements about particular marketing strategies, things like…
- Direct Mail doesn’t work!
- Google AdWords is expensive!
- Yellow Pages are history!
- No one reads Emails!
- Junk mail is dead!
Whenever I hear utterances like that, a cheeky little voice inside me says “yeah – who says?”. That is quickly replaced with a more professional thought and response (the result of years of training and hard-won experience) – “is that an opinion or based on market tests?”.
Asking that question often leads to marketing breakthroughs, as all too often it turns out that the person making the statement is reflecting their own PERSONAL like or dislike of that type of marketing.
The simple fact is, your views and mine are just opinions. They do not reflect market sentiment. They are no guide to marketing success or failure. It’s fine to have personal views, I have them too, but it’s deadly to bring them into the office and impose them on your marketing strategy.
To find out what your market thinks about how they prefer to source suppliers of your products and services, you’d better be open to testing, otherwise, you will limit your marketing, and your business.
Here’s a good case in point.
Plenty of people think that flyers and leaflets are dead. But that didn’t stop Lana and Stewart Brown of Vibralife from being prepared to run a small test when it was recommended by her Business Builder Program advisor. Vibralife are a new type of fitness clinic offering vibration training technology with luxurious and high-class members facilities.
The key to their success is generating good quality, low-cost leads and getting prospects through the door (they are really good at converting).
As part of the overall development of a marketing system for their business, they worked with Simon to create and test a flyer to be distributed to 5,000 local households.
The total cost of the A5 flyer (you can see the front below) including design, print and delivery was £307.
The Result?
Within the first month, the first 5,000 flyers generated 18 new enquiries. So far, they have converted 10 new clients, worth £3,631. That’s a 10x return on investment, and they are still getting enquiries and conversions.
By extrapolating these numbers (which Simon has done with Lana), they have worked out that if the flyers were sent every month for 6 months to the original 5,000 households, plus an additional 10,000 households in the area, this flyer strategy could earn Vibralife a return of over £65,000 for an outlay or around £5,000! But the best bit is what this successful test could now mean for the future success and growth of Vibralife.
As you can imagine, they are now busy rolling this out. Needless to say this is not the only strategy that Lana is implementing as she works with Simon. They are busy creating a marketing machine for their business of which leaflets and flyers will be an important part.
