Archive for April, 2009
Joe’s is going out of business. They’ve been one of my favorite sporting goods retailers for years, so obviously, I’m a little upset. Every few days I go back to the store near my house as they’re liquidating merchandise to see if there’s anything new I can pick up. As a matter of fact, they have a smoker I’ve wanted for quite some time. The issue is: it’s regularly over $100 and only 10% off for the sale. So I haven’t bought it. Yet.
Many people know I volunteer for the Boy Scouts. I help out at troop meetings, help scouts who are trying to advance in rank, and attend various camping trips to teach outdoors skills and help the newer scouts get used to being outside away from computers, iPods, heat, and the other amenities of modern living. This past weekend, we had our annual Camporee at Trojan Park on the river. It’s the site of the decommissioned Trojan Nuclear Plant, and a lot prettier than anyone expected.
You throw out junk mail. You record television and skip through commercials. You download music and use an iPod rather than listen to the radio. Your time is valuable, and you want to fill it with things of value. Unfortunately, more and more advertising has less and less value. So you filter it out and remove the power of media moguls to force things into your line of view.
Too often, I find myself working with clients who try to cram every bit of detail into a piece of marketing collateral. They want to impress their customers with huge words, technical specifications, and other details that the average customer doesn’t really care about. It’s painful, but I have to remind them of this fact constantly.
We’ve all been there. Budget time comes and we start cutting line items to match the numbers that are really coming in. The first thing in many companies on the chopping block is the marketing budget. This is because most managers associate “marketing” with “ritzy, expensive advertising campaign.” Just because you can’t afford the flash and dazzle of your name in lights in Times Square doesn’t mean you can’t still focus on marketing. Here are five ways you can market on a shoe-string budget: