Chris Graham: Is your marketing working for you?

The old saying in marketing has it that you know that half of your advertising is working for you, but you don’t know which half. That’s been around since the days when there was only print and radio to worry about. Then they threw in TV, and many years later unleashed the Internet on us.

Now there’s so much more out there. You need to be on TV and radio. You need to be in the papers. You need to have a website. You need to be on Facebook and Twitter. You need to be on YouTube.

That’s a lot of halves to not know what’s working for you.

And that’s not even counting what I refer to as “guerilla marketing” – rack cards, posters, flyers, all of which are so much less expensive to produce than they used to 20 years ago.

Yeah, wow.

How to make sense of it all?

Some points to ponder:

• Call to action. You need to be more than just informational in your advertising. The information about your business is a foundational element, but you need to also tell people why they need to do business with you as opposed to going somewhere else. What do you offer that the other guy doesn’t? Whether you like it or not, you need to be the pushy salesman.
• Go where the people are. I remember having to be talked into going onto Facebook for the first time. “I have a solid website that gets a lot of traffic. Why do I need Facebook?” was my response to the friend doing the pushing. “Because people are using this Facebook thing. You might want to be where the people are.” This was in 2008. This friend had a good eye, eh? If you’re not already online with your business, join us in the 21^st century. If your website looks like it was designed for the dialup era, it’s time to update. And find out how to take advantage of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and the rest. Those portals get billions of views daily. It’s where people are, and where you need to be.
• Go local. Now I’m making a pitch. Augusta Free Press is based here in Waynesboro and the Valley. We’re not in New York or Los Angeles. We’re not a long-distance phone call away; we’re just across town. Give us a call!

More information online at www.AFPBusiness.com.