Cold Calling is the marketing term for a business initiating direct contact with a potential customer, not the other way around. While it originally meant people going door to door trying to sell things, in this age it\u2019s more putting direct marketing at a limited number of potential customers, instead of blanket coverage of a region. For real world examples, think of the real estate agents \u2018Just listed\u2019 flyers they put in mailboxes around a listed property, and not the weekly mailers that came from the supermarkets. Now imagine trying to do that with an email or social media post.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sure you could try paying for mailing lists, or spending to have a post be put on everyone’s feeds in a region, but as quickly as you put the post out the receivers delete it and potentially put you on a spam or block list. That\u2019s something they can\u2019t do with a physical one. Yes they will likely throw it into the trash, but during that time they have had to look at it and people read things much faster on a printed page than on a screen, increasing your chance that you grab their attention, making it easier to follow up with them in the future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Be in places you or your website can\u2019t be<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n You may be surprised at the number of places people don\u2019t realise they can have their marketing in. Depending on the nature of your business you can put brochures and flyers in locations where they can be passive advertising. Talk to businesses which you could have a compatible relationship with to carry marketing for each other. For example a massage studio could have flyers for both a beauty studio and a hair salon, as they each deal with a different area of the beauty industry so there\u2019s no direct competition between them. There are many local business associations that will have stands to promote their members, do you have marketing with your local one? Try community centres or other local non-commercial organisations where you could have a few flyers or pin a small poster on a notice board. There\u2019s the old school notice boards you see in grocery stores, most of them these days will let you buy a space to have a poster or a brochure holder.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is passive marketing and reliant on people stopping long enough to look at it. It\u2019s also almost minimal cost to use and maintain. By picking the right places you can be sure that people will be more receptive to your marketing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Provide follow up after the deal is done<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n In this day and age you can\u2019t assume that customers will return after you\u2019ve completed a sale with them in every case. Unless you have some hook in the product that requires follow up (such as servicing or consumables under a warranty) most consumers have no \u2018brand loyalty.\u2019 This can be even worse if it\u2019s something they purchase infrequently meaning they forget where they got it from originally and just go to the most convenient supplier, even if it actually costs them more in the long run. We frequently have this problem at Copy Express as many of our customers are SME\u2019s so only buy printed material very occasionally, as in we might not see them for a year or more. So how do you reduce the chance of customers going somewhere else? By building in reminders of your business. For us here at Copy Express we always separately wrap a small part of any order and attach a \u2018You\u2019re almost out\u2019 reminder sticker with a contact information. For a trade inspection tags with the business name and contacts are always good, especially as we can print it on hard wearing plastic for a long life in hasher conditions. There\u2019s always stickers to put on items or vouchers you can include that have a reminder to come back and get a discount on the follow up sales. Just to name a few examples<\/p>\n\n\n\n Speed of response<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Being able to quickly respond to market changes is the most obvious one. It takes time to print marketing materials and to get it out to people, where you can create social media posts and have it on everyone’s feeds in a few minutes. This makes it great for \u2018knee-jerk\u2019 responses to competitors’ marketing allowing you to minimise the chances of your customers going to them on some offer or deal. This is something that physical marketing can not compete with. It takes time to print things, and the more complex the item the longer it takes to make. Add on time to physically deliver the marketing to the client and you can see how it can\u2019t compete with the digital version. That being said, there are ways around this problem which we will cover later in this article.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Very low cost per unit<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s digital so unless you\u2019re paying Facebook to boost a post, or having Google list your advertising as part of search results the only real cost is your time creating the marketing. Even paying for such marketing isn\u2019t hugely expensive meaning that it can be within even the modest marketing budgets of most Small to Medium Enterprises. (How effective it is subject for a future article.) Honestly speaking as a printing company, physical marketing can\u2019t compete with that on a cost per unit rate. But in this digital age, physical marketing isn\u2019t trying to. Printed marketing has now moved over to being a specialised tool for promotion, instead of being the primary one for businesses. It can be changed or updated after creation<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Yep, once something is printed you can\u2019t change it. So if you have to change a price or update information about a product, it\u2019s only a few minutes work to update a website vs the days of production required for the physical ones. Not to mention the costs from throwing out the old material and printing the new. Much of that can be avoided at the planning stage before you print your marketing materials by not including information that is prone to being out of date, or only printing just what you need even if it costs slightly more per unit.<\/p>\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\nWhat can digital marketing do that physical can\u2019t?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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