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There are so many marketing channels you can choose from, whether it is online or offline. What marketing channel do you use? What works for you? Are you looking for more ways to market your business and get the word out about your products and/or services? This article will show you several marketing channels you can choose from, and find out which ones work the best for you. Sometimes, you just have to plan to use a particular marketing channel and then put your all into it. Over time, the results will show you which ones to stick with.

Marketing communications have been around since businesses have. It is just a method to get your potential customers and clients interested in your business, to get to know your business name, products, mission, services, etc. Marketing is a way to get your potential customers and clients to walk through that door or click on your website. From there, it is all about sales. However, you can also choose several marketing methods that are inside your store or on your website.

Direct marketing is extremely important. There are several different ways to direct market. According to Wikipedia, direct marketing is used when measurable leads, sales, or traffic (retail or web) are the objective. A direct marketing effort is undertaken to generate a specific response — which can be tracked and measured.

There are many channels to choose from when using direct marketing, including the following:

- Newspapers
- Magazines
- TV
- Mail
- Email
- Websites
- Radio
- Billboard

Direct marketing is basically when you are advertising to a certain group of potential customers and you ask them to call you, visit your website, or come into your store. That is the first step in making a sale.

Direct mail marketing can be done two different ways. One, for example, if you want to advertise locally, you could send out postcards, flyers, etc. to every resident in your area or town. If you want to target your existing customers or potential customers you can send the mail to all of them.

Email marketing can be a little tricky because of all of the spam programs out there, and people getting ultimately frustrated about potential spam messages. However, you can use email marketing in a safe and possibly effective way. You can use opt-in emails to send out messages to market your business, and it has been very successful for many web businesses.

No matter what form of marketing you choose to use, make sure you first weigh the pros and cons of each one. One of the biggest cons can be the cost. Is it worth choosing a certain direct marketing method for the cost? The pros can be your increase in sales, website hits and more. You will also need a way to track every direct marketing method you choose so you can see which ones are doing what. Once you find a marketing plan that works for you, you will be on your way to direct marketing success!

http://www.dmglimited.co.uk/ is a Direct Mail List Broker, offering many options in relation to marketing channels

It surprises me how poorly we treat our most valuable company asset.

We wouldn’t dare buy an expensive piece of equipment for our business and then ignore it. If the machine required regular attention, we would put it on our calendar to regularly check it for oil levels and other maintenance requirements.

Yet there is an asset that each business consistently ignores.

What is this ignored asset?

Your customer list.

Businesses focus too much on landing new customers they ignore their former customers and sometimes even their current customers.

My suspicion that the underlying problem has to do with the way we start our businesses. When we begin, we have no customers. So we start the get new customer process. This is great. The problem is we never kick into the nurture the customer process.

Yet it is so much easier to sell an existing or previous client than to find a new prospect and sell them. They’ve already purchased from you, they already know who you are and what you can do. If your product or service is worth anything, you owe it to your customers to continually sell them your solutions.

A good example of this is a client I had a few years ago. He was in the supplements business and was struggling. The company had been losing $12,000 per month for the 18 months in a row. They’d hired a well known marketing consultant who seemed to know nothing about small business.

They wanted me to help them raise some more money. I’ve found over the years that money is rarely the real problem. That was the case here as well.

I asked them how many clients they’d had over the years. They had 160 active clients and 2,500 inactive clients. I asked when the last time the inactive clients had been contacted…no one could remember.

I had two of the people in the company each call 20 former customers a day. Within 30 days they closed so much business they were more than breaking even and didn’t need emergency funding to keep the doors open.

How do you nurture your customer list?

Regularly touch base with them every 4-8 weeks. Do not try to sell them, but find out how they are doing.

- Call to find out what has been happening with them
- Send them a article that can help their business
- Call them about a helpful seminar you heard about
- Mail them a book or a whitepaper that would be of interest to them
- Send them an email about a helpful hint for their business
- Put them on your newsletter list either physical or electronic

One of my clients triples their daily sales every time they send out a newsletter to their list. The newsletter is not a sales pitch it is an informative article about the concerns of their clients.

Dan Swanson is an Internet Marketing Consultant who helps clients attract an endless stream of qualified visitors and convert those visitors to customers. For more information about Internet Marketing Consulting visit http://www.iq2.com.

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