The Many Faces of Marketing

Finding your best telemarketing plan

Marketing is an essential business tool needed to create awareness for both your company and your company’s products or services. Marketing done right will attract new clients, retain current ones and increase your revenue. Marketing done wrong however, will only drain your budget.

There are three basic forms of marketing you can choose to implement--telemarketing, online and traditional. While all three are viable options, it may be that focusing more heavily on one is what your business needs to succeed and grow.

Telemarketing

Telemarketing is, or rather was, the black sheep of the marketing family. Telemarketing services really received a bad reputation from firms who abused the process through the use of harassing tactics involving pre-recorded robocalls and inappropriate calling times. With the help of a little government crackdown and a general improvement in the public perception, telemarketing is on the rise and expected to reach $15.5 Billion in revenue by 2015.

Telemarketing is highly valuable--it is the only form of marketing where you can say for 100 percent certainty you have directly contacted your target market. You can use it to sell a product, inform the public of a new product or gather relevant information about the buying habits of your target consumer. B2B telemarketing works in the same fashion and has the same benefits available, plus one.

B2B telemarketing also allows your business to make contact with potential partners as well as generate revenue. Partnerships are helpful for small businesses because it offers a way to split costs and efforts for a variety of functions. Shared office space, joint advertising campaigns or combined customer service representatives are just a few expenses partnered companies can share.

Online

Online marketing may be the fastest growing option available. Still considered a relatively new practice, consumer Internet usage has grown too much for this form to be overlooked by a business of any size. Online marketing can mean e-mailing potential customers with product information or upcoming specials, optimizing your website for search engine rankings or simply creating a Facebook page or Twitter Account.

Social media sites have grown so much in popularity they now provide small business owners an endless supply of potential customers, all reachable for free. Sheila Dukas-Janokas, a small business owner in Burlingame, California, attributes 15 percent of her business to the social networking sites. The growing number of users to sites like these allow you to reach a larger demographic of people that may have taken several different targeted campaigns using other marketing methods.

Traditional

While traditional marketing may be giving ground to new methods, it will never be rendered obsolete. A traditional marketing campaign could mean putting flyers in the mail, standing on the street handing out flyers, sponsoring an event or placing an ad in the newspaper or on television. These practices have will always have value because they allow your message to be potentially be seen by the most people at one given time.

One knock against tradition marketing practices is to be effective on a large scale, developing and executing the plans can get a little pricey. Taking out an ad in the newspaper, radio or T.V. is an expensive process, especially if you want it to air during popular listening or viewing times.

As a small business, your marketing budget is likely somewhat limited, so its important to focus heavily on the cheaper and free options available. The social media sites offer a free way to get your name out there and a telemarketing firm can be an expensive option as well. Then, with whatever is left from the budget, plan a specifically targeted traditional marketing campaign like an advertisement or sponsor an event.

Patrick Kelly is an expert writer on phone systems based in San Diego, California.  He writes extensively for an online resource that provides expert advice on purchasing and outsourcing decisions for small business owners and entrepreneurs such as VoIP service at Resource Nation.