Building Your Marketing Platform
Your marketing platform is the crucial element to drawing traffic to your website, building your professional appearance in your community, and keeping your customers coming back for more. Chimpy Design Studios is always learning new marketing methods because that's what we focus on. You should be focused on building a following for your business and retaining that following for years to come. Your website can help attract new customers, but only if your current customers and new prospects know how to find you. That's where Chimpy Design Studios comes in.
Every client we accept for website design projects has the opportunity of working with Chimpy Design Studios to develop a marketing platform strong enough to build onto and flexible enough to make your own. This platform is all about the basics, what you need and where you need it. For example, if you own a small diner you'll need business cards and maybe some fliers to give customers advertising your website and that you now accept call ahead take-out orders. The full menu is on your website complete with prices and the phone number to call for your customers to place their order. If your web page is optimized for call ahead take-out orders along with your town/city name you'll be drawing some traffic to your website and hopefully building a larger dedicated following to your diner.
As you saw in the example above, it doesn't take tens of thousands of dollars to launch a solid small business marketing campaign. The business cards might cost you $50-75 for 1,000 plus $10 for the design, and the fliers you can get 1,000 black and white copies at a local copy center for 10-cents per page with 2 fliers per page totaling $50 plus $15 for the design. Your 5-page website design, if done by Chimpy Design Studios, cost you $250, and your website hosting fees are $100 a year. On the high-end, that's less than $500 to design and launch your first campaign. And the best part, this campaign could continue for days, weeks, months, or even years without changing a thing.
There are companies out there who specialize
in nonprofit and/or small business marketing. Many of them will say you need to invest more money than you have before they can help you. Then, because you don't have the money, the best advice they can offer is to contact them again when you do have the money. That's customer service at its best and helpful advice, right? Well, Chimpy Design Studios isn't one of those specialized
marketing companies, but we won't close the door on you either. We will help you even if you don't have much money to invest in marketing. That's customer service at its best, and we'd like to meet the person who disagrees.
- Ask you to spend more money than you have
- Tell you that the best way to raise money is to spend money on expensive advertising
- Provide you with useless facts about how successful our services have been for million-dollar companies
- Tell you to come back later
- Ask you to advertise yourself
- Tell you about low-cost alternatives to high-cost advertising
- Provide useful resources to you for growing your small business
- Tell you the truth
A Realistic Approach
| Let's take a closer look using a pretend company | |
| Company Name: | Elegant Sand Castles, Inc. |
|---|---|
| Purpose/Mission: | Custom sand castles for weddings and corporate events. |
| Location: | Miami, FL |
| Website Address: | SomeWebsite.com |
| Marketing Budget: | $450 |
Elegant Sand Castles only has $450 to invest in marketing and they need that to stretch for at least 3 months. They've come to Chimpy Design Studios for help.
At first glance you're probably thinking, that's impossible,
but what you're missing is that Chimpy Design Studios loves this type of client and yes, we can help. In fact, we've decided to make a deal with Elegant Sand Castles, inc. and we're going to design their 10-page website for $100 now and in 3 months they'll pay us the remaining balance of $250. This leaves them with $350 today to pay for other things. So, we get them set up with a good web hosting company that charges them $100 for the year and they're down to $250 for 3 months of marketing. Your run of the mill marketing company would laugh at them, but we're here to help.
Like the remaining website balance, we agree to bill them for business card and flier designs in 3 months and we design 2 variations of business cards and 1 flier. So, in 3 months they'll be billed for a total of $285 to finish paying us for our services. Notice, we're not charging them for support along the way... Elegant Sand Castles is only paying for the design work, as agreed. No client will be billed for our support.
Elegant Sand Castles is a new company that has limited capabilities to reach potential high profile clients, so we ask them to get their friends and family involved in the process. Friends and family, we explain can be the most powerful marketing tool you have at your disposal. Ask them to place a link on their social networking profiles for your new website. Ask them to bring some of your fliers and business cards to work with them and give them away like candy. Be honest with them and they'll do whatever they can for you. 250 copies of the flier are distributed to friends and family at a cost of $18. 1000 business cards of each design are printed for $120. A business card is stapled to each of the 250 fliers given to friends and family.
Oh no, there's only $112 left of the $450 marketing budget! That's okay, we're going to do some free marketing now.
The owner of Elegant Sand Castles is encouraged to sign up for numerous free social networking websites. Use these websites for what they are, social networking. Your objective is to raise eyebrows and get people to check out your website. After a few coaching sessions, Elegant Sand Castles starts making some great connections for corporate events and a few potential wedding customers. But, after a couple of weeks nobody has hired them.
Let's mix things up. Since Elegant Sand Castles is a business that really should be promoted outdoors, we encourage them to go to the beach and take some business cards with them. Their new objective, build a sand castle that draws a crowd and maybe even creates a buzz on social networking websites. You'd be amazed how many people will post a message from their cell phones... you know, those same cell phones that can attach a photo to their social networking post. By the end of the day, the owner of Elegant Sand Castles is exhausted from answering questions about the business and giving out business cards like they were candy. But, it worked and plans have been made to return the following weekend, this time with 250 fliers that cost $18 to print, and is repeated once a month thereafter.
Three months later, Elegant Sand Castles still has $48 of the original $450 marketing budget and has their third job booked for next weekend. The local news station really helped out when they came to the beach the second month and interviewed the owner, saying how original this business is and referring people to the website for more information. The local papers picked up on the story too, but they didn't tell people how to get more information. And of the hundreds fliers and business cards given out at the beach, only 2 people followed through with their promise, but the sand castles at their events were amazing!
