There are lots of ways to generate business. Today, the most popular forms are digital which don’t require a lot of leg work. With a little bit of money and some typing you can launch a google adwords to begin having customers to your website. Now, what if your primary business can’t come from the web (your a local business – say a pizza place or restaurant), well we have tips for you too 
1. Make an offer that they can’t refuse.
With all of the noise on the web, in direct mail, etc you have to stand out from your competition and be 7ft tall at a little person convention. It all comes down to the offer(s) because no matter what channels (print, phone, and the web, etc) you push this offer through, if the offer sucks – you’ll just waste money pushing that sucky offer. How does one do that in business? Well, for our business, for new customer acquisition, we contact companies through many channels and tell them we’ll print our high quality business cards for them for FREE so they can see what we can do for them without costing them any money. It also allows them to see their artwork printed as opposed to seeing samples of other peoples artwork that they don’t care about. So – Stand out against it all.
2. Pick the channels you want to push the offer through
Are you web based? Is your business local? Is it both?
This is important when choosing the channels that you are going to market through.
Our business is both local (customers local meet with us on occasion) and web based. Channels that we use include:
3. Push out the offer through your channels
There are so many channels – email, pay-per-click, banner ads, giveaways, printed marketing pieces, cold calling, social media, etc. You should try as many as your budget and time allow to get the best effect.
4. Measure your success
Was it successful? Did you make money? What did you learn? What could you have done better?
If you have answers to these questions, then apply them to the next step.
5. Re-run
the campaign with a slightly tweaked offer, text, call to action, etc to a new list of customers.
This will either increase or decrease results. Whatever happens, you should know your next steps based on what happened.
No customers = New offer. Some customers = tweaked delivery. Lots of customers = Send to more prospects.
6. One and done.
A big thing missed by most marketers is that they have the “one and done” approach to marketing. Meaning, they contact a customer or a lead one time with an offer and thats it. The person may be slightly interested, but not ready to order. You’ll never know because you only made the offer last a short time or they forgot about you 3 weeks later when they were ready to order. Re-run that campaign a couple more times – maybe changing up the offer slightly or your promotion design to see what brings more buyers.
The point is, you should try different offers, different delivery tactics (emails, direct mail, cold calls, banner ads, ppc), different channels, and measure and track what works vs. what doesn’t. After all, no one knows your business is there nor do they care about you or your business until you give them an offer to make them care/know your there.
Get out there and crush it!
PrintSmart.co provides some of the largest as well as some of the smallest companies with high quality printed marketing materials and stationery for the business. We provide business cards, postcards, brochures, flyers, envelopes, letterhead, door hangers, plastic cards, stickers, magnets, and much more.
