For those that follow us on Twitter, its fairly obvious that we've been actively stepping up our marketing efforts in order to diversify our list of clients. Love Jenkins Associates have historically dealt with commercial, educational or healthcare clients and have thrived on repeat business, but with the recent and future inevitable cuts and spend reduction we've decided to dip back into the domestic market.
Now, marketing can be very expensive and can be done by just throwing money at a marketing man to sort out but we decided to go a seperate route. Our marketing strategy is effectively..
- Introducing ourselves to relevant contacts by email (not our favourite method)
- Cultivating relationships over Twitter.
- Getting into as many directories as possible.
- Spreading ourselves all over the internet (as now!)
The difficulty with marketing like this is that there is no accurate method of working out how each avenue performs. One things for certain though, and that's that the number of jobs coming in has risen twofold since November when we started. Granted, many of these are small and not very profitable but its achieving the aim of widening the customer base.
Emails
Email marketing is a difficult one. The issue being that you send out 1000 emails to 'relevant' professionals, but in all likeliness irritate 200 of them. We've been trying different variations of our marketing email and following the progress on Google Analytics. Wording is everything, but it can't be too long. Pictures can interest people, but also make them delete the email without even reading it - Its a very difficult balancing act. We've not got any direct work from email marketing, but have had some good conversations with like minded professionals and have no doubt made some important contacts for a later date.
The way we look at it is that on Twitter we now have more than 2100 followers (shameless plug here) which translates to 2100 people that are aware of us that weren't before. If 2050 of them have no interest in ever using that's OK, but if 10 decided to, with the time spent building up this following it is well worth it. Once set up, it takes up about 5 minutes of our time a day, and usually this is when we have nothing else to do, like waiting for a train. We've also got a few smaller jobs from Twitter which is never a bad thing.
Directories
We still get work from people looking in the Yellow Pages or Thompsons Local. We only ever advertise ourselves in the free section, so it can't be a bad thing either way. Also, so I'm told, it helps your google rankings..
Blogging
Obviously we're new to this, but already its driven a number of people to our website.. Fingers crossed!
We'd welcome any comments regarding marketing for professional companies, it'd be interesting to hear what everyone thinks (especially about email marketing!)
Will
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