I am pretty impressed with some of my client’s commitment to maintaining an active email marketing and now social networking strategy. Some are doing it very well and with every email, with every post, they are using an easy, quick-touch medium to execute a very effective strategy called One-to-One Marketing.
One-to-One Marketing is a staple of the Dog Star Media approach to small business marketing. Adapted from major corporate database concepts (which you can read about in the book Enterprise One-to-One by Don Peppers), our approach is simplified for small businesses. The basics are the same: collect as much information from contacts as possible and use it to tailor your approach to gaining them as a customer or renewing them as a customer. My coaching clients and retainer clients know that I talk about the database all the time. The reason is that, a small business has a limited sphere of influence. A small business can only buy so much media to expose and advertise itself. The shortest route to making a large group of interested contacts is to cultivate the relationships you already have and get those contacts to act as foot soldiers in promoting and referring you.
Given the database technologies available, it is easy to collect, manage and mobilize that contact information. The actual activity takes very little time in most cases. However, it is something that should be done with strict regularity. It is an uphill battle of attrition to be top of mind with any one contact in your database, much less many of them. Luckily, your email marketing engine, database and social networking site can do the heavy lifting for you.
So that takes us back to email marketing and Facebook. These are only mediums of conveying your message. This is where we shift gears from persistent scheduling and all-business regularity to messages that make sense in the medium and work to convey bits of information. In a best case scenario, you are reaching a long list of your contacts on a regular basis, through a medium they like with something interesting.
And, when you do it my way, we measure their interest by where they click and how often they do it. The commitment to the messaging activity, the constant updating of the information, the measuring of who is clicking on what... guess what? You are doing a small business-sized version of One-to-One Marketing.
And, it works.
For more information on email marketing, database marketing, social networking strategies and One-to-One Marketing, please email me at donald@dogstarmedia.com.
