The following article is written by CustomMade guest blogger Doug Turner of Turner Custom Furniture. Doug shares insightful and useful marketing tools for woodworkers looking to showcase themselves and their work in order to educate consumers about custom and increase productivity.
This article will be presented in two parts.
Part 1: Your Marketing Clean-up Checklist
Spending time on marketing is always time well spent. But it’s also important to keep it current. December is a great time to tighten up your marketing for the New Year. I’ve included some big topics here, topics which could not be covered completely in a short article. I hope they will serve as conversation starters and points to ponder. Here are a few things to check:
• Update your website:
- Post new projects and write some new content (Google, Yahoo and visitors love fresh content).
- Update your product prices and shipping costs.
- Update your contact information.
- Look for and fix broken links (Search engines as well as visitors hate broken links).
- Make sure your website’s copyright date is current. I can’t speak to any legal issue here, but “All content copyright 1996” implies that the site owner hasn’t updated his site in a good while (and that the information contained therein is no longer relevant).
- Look for and get rid of out-dated information, such as “Thanks to all of our customers for making 1994 a great year!”
- Consider a complete website redesign. This is a big topic, but one which needs to be addressed in the context of this article. I realize a website design can be expensive – so expensive in fact that I learned to create websites myself. This was (and still is) a vast undertaking, but it has paid for itself many times over. I’m not suggesting that all of my readers should run out and learn website design. The point I’m driving at here is that a bad or outdated website design should be dealt with now. It may not be enough to update pictures if nobody can find them. I’ll leave the components of a good website design for another article. In the meantime, there is information on this topic all over the internet.
• Update or get rid of any expired coupons or promotions you’ve got floating around.
• Find all of your marketing on the internet, (I’ve got listings on tons of free sites), and make sure your contact information and website address is current.
• Update your business Facebook account. Post some current projects. Make some new friends.
• Consider a new truck or car sign if yours is looking dingy. (Same goes for your ratty business shirts or hats.)
• Update your business card and identity package (letter head, envelopes etc.) if your address or any other information has changed.
• Consider a design refresh. Keep something of the old, and add a new element. For example, I recently updated my business identity. I changed the background color to a darker blue, and made the type all white. Big companies do this all the time (Coke seems to do it four times per year). Why? Your design, in short, is a “picture” of your company to potential clients. As such, it should be kept fresh and relevant. This is one of those big topics I mentioned.
• Update any print advertising you’ve got (especially automatic renewals), such as phone book ads.
• Consider getting rid of underperforming advertising. If you don’t know what’s working and what is not, it may be time to start tracking your advertising, and asking clients how they found you. You may be surprised by the results.
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