When I worked in Retail, Marketing wasn’t low cost. I was told that to advertise a garden centre, you needed to spend AT LEAST 10% of turnover on marketing.
The key methods of marketing (back then in the 1990’s) were Leaflet drops, Newspaper and magazine advertising and Radio and Television marketing. It was also expected that you routinely gave away large amounts of “freebies” to encourage customers in.
Now we’re in 2022, the internet is on our side, and there are now a lot more methods of advertising yourself / your business in a low cost manner.
For the purposes of this course, our definitions of no cost and low cost are
NO COST
“No further investment in materials or resources than you have already purchased, the only investment is in your time.”
(ok I realise that there is a cost associated with your time, but we'll talk more about that later on)
LOW COST
“Less than £360 worth of investment (£300 plus VAT) in materials or resources in one calendar year.
”
Obviously there are a lot of other marketing activities that will fall beyond these boundaries. We'll touch on what they are on this masterclass, but we won't go into them in depth.
Now is the time for you to get scribbling.
Before i give you the answers, i'd like to you think of as many No cost and Low cost methods of marketing as you can think of. (there's a sheet to print off to guide you)
remember my definition again
"finding and reaching out to all those people who might possibly be interested in what you do, and by educating them, befriending them and beguiling them, persuade them that they need your products whatever price you are selling them at and you are the only supplier they should look at “
How many methods of marketing have you used in the last year (count all forms of social media as only one of the methods)
less than 3
3-5
5-10
more than 10