Up till now, you have been freely exploring the various marketing strategies and tactics to apply to your business. Now is the time to apply a dollar amount to each of your proposed marketing strategies. Unless you have really deep pockets, likelihood is that you will start to tweak the tactics to suit your budget.

Think Low Cost High Impact Marketing At Onset

Make it a conscious habit until it becomes subconsciously part of you. That way you need much less tweaking on the budget. Imagine how much ad money you have to spend in order to achieve at least 7 times to be seen or heard before you can influence a buy on your product. There are however, ways to achieve Low Cost High Impact Marketing.

Include Social Networks as part of your overall small business marketing strategies such as launch your marketing campaigns via Facebook or MySpace. Leverage on Twitter as a marketing platform, create a credible image and persona to successfully market your products through this channel. They are comparatively effective, efficient as well as cost efficient. The key reason is the extensive and explosive reach of potential target audience.

More Could Be Less. Niche Your Market Segments

Yes, focus on select potential target segments which your product directly maps their needs. What is an ad message when it has extensive reach but appeals to less relevant targets? Would you rather that you focus your ad message to the relevant and willing target segments? And, with a direct need for your product, you are reducing the rejection reasons they have about buying your products. Selling to these groups hence becomes easier with lesser objections.

Collaborate, Don’t Compete

This is especially true if you run a small business which has limited resources both financially and physically. Forge strategic alliances with other small businesses of similar nature or become a major link in their business supply chain. This gives you stronger bargaining power and potentially opens up new distribution channels for you.

Member-Get-Member Scheme

Referral plans or whatever you term it, it still is word-of-mouth marketing. Not just the Banks do it. And you can do it too! But it has worked since time in memorial. Why? Because people believe people whom they know, who have tried and test your product and genuinely recommend to one another the goodness of your product.

So put on your thinking hats and start to churn out low cost high impact small business marketing strategies.

Measurable goals help to guide you along the right track, allowing you tweak your campaigns and marketing plan along the way as you phase your campaigns. Measurable goals not only help you to track your spending, profit and loss but also operational efficiencies such as lead generation rates, leads-to-sales conversion rates etc.

The ROI or Return on Investment is the measurement of your business’ success or failure. There is need to benchmark your direct marketing campaign with your respective industry standards and then set internal benchmarks as measurements.

A general rule of thumb is that for traditional mode of postal direct mailer to new potential databases, a 3% – 5% response rate & 30% leads-to-sales conversion rate is considered above average achievements. That said, it is not uncommon to find conversion rates of as high as 10% in very successful new campaigns. And of course, direct mailers to existing databases could yield greater conversion, with the assumption that you have loyal customers and products that continuously meet their needs.

The BusinessFast4ward Direct Marketing Campaign ROI Guide & Checklist

We have put together a simple guide to help you measure your ROI specific to your physical Direct Mailing campaigns. Let us explore the list of guiding questions below:

How many Postal Direct Mailers/ emails/ text ad messages (sms) have you sent out?

How much is the per unit cost and hence the total cost of your direct mailer?

Note that for emails you should still factor in your production cost, and manpower cost if applicable.

How much business revenue is generated from this campaign?

This is assuming that you have set a monitoring system for incoming revenues. Note that it is critical to set up an easy to manage revenue monitoring system which enables you to have timely and real=time information on specific campaigns as this gives you’re the nimbleness to make changes to your marketing strategies and tactics during the campaign period.

What is my ROI of this campaign?

The ROI of any campaign or marketing activity is calculated as [Total Revenue to date – Total Cost to date]/Total Cost to Date.

Note that the ROI is represented in a decimal form of which you may convert to percentages for easier reference.

How does my ROI compare to my Industry ROI? Or my greatest competitor’s ROI?

Now that you have your ROI on hand, you should first compare that to the industry ROI. If you are above it, do not let off and keep up the push for better improvements.

How does my ROI compare to my competitor’s ROI?

More importantly, should you be privy to your greatest competitor’s ROI, compare and make adjustments to exceed that of your competitor. This should serve as a continuous activity whenever you are doing your marketing campaigns. That said, when comparing your competitor’s campaign ROI, take note of the similarities and differences in their direct marketing mix and channels adopted. You should compare “apples to apples”. Too many diverging factors would make your competitor comparison meaningless.

What variable components in my ROI can I tweak to improve my returns?

This is the million dollar question. Timing is of essence, and having access to real time campaign results gives you the edge to start making adjustments to your direct marketing mix.

The key components you can tweak are your promotional mix in terms of the push factors. These are namely creating additional personal selling or telemarketing in support of your direct mailers, distribution of flyers at critical locations applicable to your business.

If you are strapped of funds, you could consider free press write ups, or subtly market your business via social networking sites. You might also forge alliance with other renown internet marketers in joint ventures to market your product over the internet, provided of course that your product offerings are suitable for the internet in terms of target audiences as well as delivery channels. And should you have excess funds, you may consider leveraging on TV ads or sponsor a radio talk show.

Check out the BusinessFast4ward Marketing Plan Template here for more details.

Large corporations, by virtue of their business clout, often forgo niche segments for the mass segments by way of economies of scale which accords greater profitability. Having said this, there are large corporations which focus specifically on niche markets, whereby the niches are identified as profitably viable and usually dominate that space.

Traditional niche marketers are often reliant on the loyalty business model to maintain a profitable volume of sales. I shall address the slight difference between online niche marketing and traditional niche marketing.

Niche markets can open windows of opportunities for entrepreneurs and become feasibly profitable, at times in a big way against mainstream competition, thanks to the clever implementation of strategic focused specialization, and a largely dismissed segment by large competition. Simply look to Ben & Jerry’s Premium Ice Cream and you will know what I am driving at.

In the Porter’s Competitive Advantage Model , niche marketing dominates the “Differentiation” and/or “Differentiation Focus” quadrants of the matrix, with the former expounding on intrinsic value-added features as well as benefits, and the latter on extrinsic, high niche perceived value of the product/service.

Sourcing and “sniffing” out the customers initially could be a challenge but it is true that you will be able to lock them in as your life-long customers once you are able to meet and exceed their needs with your products and services, continuously enhancing and delighting them with the product/service experience.

Note that your success to dominating your niche market is reliant on easy access a group of fast-growing prospects with no current dominating competitor in sight as yet. Work out a comprehensive marketing plan, have a stream of products in consecutively to ensure that you lock in the loyalty of your customers and henceforth, protect your continued profit streams.

Always remember, this is your space, your niche and you must grow it with the ultimate aim to dominate it.