Small widgets - big returns

Naturally, there are plenty of sales and business gurus out there that will tell you that the advice that they can give you will be the true turning point in the lifespan of your business. Of course, if you want the real juicy advice, you’re going to have to pay for it – anything from a simple book costing you around £15 to a seminar costing you several hundred.

Ultimately, these things all have one thing in common – if you want to do more business, then you have to pay for it. This is an accepted rule in commerce, and yet there are still people out there that believe that they can do all of their marketing for free!

Now it goes without saying (and yet oddly enough, I will say it) that there are some elements to any marketing strategy which don’t cost money – word of mouth, referrals, etc. But let’s be real for a moment – you’re only going to get referrals once you’re up and running, and those initial customers are going to cost money.

So, assuming that we can all agree that we need to invest in our customers, how can we go about keeping our costs down? Well, for this blog I’m going to talk about trade shows – mainly because it’s something I know quite a lot about.

In the past, I’ve spoken about not giving out gifts to everyone who comes by. There is real value in giving higher priced items to a smaller selection of genuine potential customers. To learn more about the metrics here, go through the archives and look for the posting entitled “Your money is no good here”.

But some people have a very small budget indeed – perhaps just a few hundred pounds, and this could mean that the higher priced gifts are not the best strategy for them. Is it all bad news? Of course not – we can still help.

There are plenty of simple exhibition widgets out there that cost under 50p each. We don’t need to go into specifics here, but you’re welcome to search through our on line catalogue by clicking HERE.

So let’s buy ourselves 1000 units and we’ll keep our total budget to £500 on merchandise. Now how much is an average customer worth to you? Is it £500? £1000? £5000? It’s important to take a look at your customers’ average spend because it’s a great way to gaze into your business’ crystal ball and forecast the future.

OK, let’s say that the average customer is worth £1000 to you. You’re going to give out 1000 gifts at a show and have a result only slightly better than absolute zero. That’s right, you get one new customer. Think about that for a moment – that’s a 0.1% success rate. If that’s what you think you’re capable of, may I interest you in a career in a non sales environment? Perhaps something with animals or mops?

So we get our rubbish return but, hey presto, we’ve actually made a 100% profit on our marketing investment! Not bad really – and that’s the worse case scenario.

So now that you can see, in a nutshell, just how powerful a small expense can be, isn’t it time you started thinking about what merchandise you’d like, rather than whether or not you think it will work for you?