Marketing sanity/pricing check

[Big Jim]

So a few months ago a friend on facebook advertised his marketing business, I struck up a convo we got chatting and 3 months later we are at the point we are now discussing prices / ideas

background, we have brick and mortar in a small town (population ~10,000)
shop location gets very poor natural footfall being just on the edge of the town, we do have parking out front and it is in a spot where a LOT of traffic has to pass due to the one way system in our town.

so that said.We had a chat on the phone about certain ideas, 1 that I have poo poo'ed so far is for him to design me an advert for the local paper who want something stupid like £900 + VAT for a full page advert for a single week.
They apparently have a reader base of 13,000.
This doesn't seem high enough impact to me.

I am considering getting 20,000 suppliers printed and distributed 4 times to 5000 homes over 4 months, cost in total of this will be ~£1100 I imagine


Through the 5 years we have been open We have built up a customer DB of around 1000 names and addresses
He can design & print a flyer (with an exclusive offer) with accompanying letter, and post to 1000 customers for £679
Is this reasonable, and more importantly is it generally speaking a good idea ?
I'm thinking half price service or something, so if I can drag 20 people in (2 - 3%) I can make my money back, and if we can push more than that then obviously we make a profit.

The problem is it doesn't drive "new" business as such (spec below)

1 - Advertise Shop with direct mail shot to customer base, approx 900 recipients
–– A5 double sided flyer design, promoting Mobile and PC repairs/maintenence etc
–– Offer to customers One device repair have other device xx% discount
£100.00
–– Print of 900 x flyers £70.00
–– Supply A4 laser paper, and print personalised colour single sided letter £55.00
–– Machine fold letter to A5 and enclose with supplied Invite into C5 window envelope.
Supply C5 window envelope, overprinted in mono to face with PPI and Return
address.
£130.00
–– Discounted 2nd Class postage, letter 0 - 100grms @ 36p per item (TBC) £324.00
Total price £679.00


£550 for a website redesign (below is his spec)
–– Design upgrade to website, plus template design so customer can add further
product/service pages and landing pages for campaigns. Addition of news/blog
area.

 

[PC Doctor]

Re Website, buy some hosting and install WordPress plus a theme you like. Add as many different pages as you like and learn something new whilst doing it.

That's exactly what I did, website gets on average 500 unique visitors a month with on average 4 pages per visitor and an onsite time of around 3.5 minutes. This is the only advertising we use and it is bringing in roughly 12 new customers a week.

Ongoing costs of £25 per month for good secure hosting and a bit of work writing blog posts to increase SEO

 

[Big Jim]

Re Website, buy some hosting and install WordPress plus a theme you like. Add as many different pages as you like and learn something new whilst doing it.

That's exactly what I did, website gets on average 500 unique visitors a month with on average 4 pages per visitor and an onsite time of around 3.5 minutes. This is the only advertising we use and it is bringing in roughly 12 new customers a week.

Ongoing costs of £25 per month for good secure hosting and a bit of work writing blog posts to increase SEO

Our website is actually built on the "zen" wordpress template that the guy on here used to seell under the guise of "the ultimate tech site"
I am just not 100% happy with the look and layout which I thought this guy/company would go someway to fixing.

Given that he could end up doing a full site redesign (based on the template I already have) or just tweaking it a bit, is it not worth getting a professional designer to lay it our nicely ? I'm not actually sure which he is doing haven't discussed that in detail yet.


FWIW, he told me his site is built on wordpress and I've got to say it looks smart







Anyway, what can you do to boost awareness in a small town, the "other" guys round here seem to be doing very well, they set up 10 years before me and have "our town name" Computers.

They are also pretty much in the town centre and on one of the main streets so generate more footfall than we do.
However I constantly hear people complain about
attitude
service
pricing
how long its taking them
charged for things they haven't asked for

they also have this extremely dodgy practice of installing Bullguard on every PC that goes in there without actually making it clear to the customer.
said customer then has theirname@otherbusinessdomain.co.uk as the account name so they have to contact that business to continue their subscription, as theyd on't actually give the customer access to the email account they have setup, or the password for the bullguard account.

 

[4ycr]

My thoughts. I designed my first website two websites, while I was technically capable it got me nowhere. I got someone to do it for me and they worked on the wording, I then got someone to do SEO and I now get a lot more traffic to my site than before.

You mentioned a lot of addresses but how many email addresses do you have? start collecting them for newsletters or email blasts with offers, it is a lot cheaper, even if you do the mail shot to your existing clients just to get their email addresses for future use and it might just jog some memories to people who have forgotten you or they might pass the offer on to a friend.

You say you have a lot of traffic going past, do you have a street sign and is it updated with different offers and eye-catching? I don't mean the sign above your door

 

[jmitservices]

Are you friendly or have done any work for any local newsagents?

One of my relations runs a successful newsagents and once or twice a year I get around 4000-5000 flyers from Vista print (cost me around £60-70) and she will then place them into all of the papers that delivered by the paperboys.

However my main source for customers are local village books. I'm currently listed in 5 village books, 4 are bi-monthly and 1 is monthly. In total they go out to around 50,000 homes by Royal Mail. But I do pay a lot for these. I much prefer this to the flyers as people tend to hang onto the village books. Normally when I have a flyer come through the door it goes straight into the bin!!

Just done a quick Google search, something like this... (not sure on your exact area)
http://www.shoppersguidechesterfield.co.uk/business/asg.htm (looks like it hasent been updated in a while)
http://www.warwickdirectories.co.uk/home

 

[Big Jim]

My thoughts. I designed my first website two websites, while I was technically capable it got me nowhere. I got someone to do it for me and they worked on the wording, I then got someone to do SEO and I now get a lot more traffic to my site than before.

You mentioned a lot of addresses but how many email addresses do you have? start collecting them for newsletters or email blasts with offers, it is a lot cheaper, even if you do the mail shot to your existing clients just to get their email addresses for future use and it might just jog some memories to people who have forgotten you or they might pass the offer on to a friend.

You say you have a lot of traffic going past, do you have a street sign and is it updated with different offers and eye-catching? I don't mean the sign above your door

We have an A board outside the shop, but the sign is fixed (ie not one of those where you can insert different paper adverts) although that said I don't mind changing it if it is likely to drive more customers. Also have wooden signs attached to both exterior walls (it is a standalone building by the way) as well as the main sign above the door, and there is space to put a 3rd on the other side of the door although the signs on the front of the shop can only be seen by traffic going 1 way.
The guy I have been talking to will redesign these for me for £60 a each (which isn't really that bad IMO)

unfortunately we didn't collect email addresses steadfastly when we started, it was only in the last couple of months we decided to get one from everyone (kicking myself now) although to be fair I have never been shown how to run a business so making mistakes is all part of the learning curve I guess.

Are you friendly or have done any work for any local newsagents?

One of my relations runs a successful newsagents and once or twice a year I get around 4000-5000 flyers from Vista print (cost me around £60-70) and she will then place them into all of the papers that delivered by the paperboys.

However my main source for customers are local village books. I'm currently listed in 5 village books, 4 are bi-monthly and 1 is monthly. In total they go out to around 50,000 homes by Royal Mail. But I do pay a lot for these. I much prefer this to the flyers as people tend to hang onto the village books. Normally when I have a flyer come through the door it goes straight into the bin!!

Just done a quick Google search, something like this... (not sure on your exact area)
http://www.shoppersguidechesterfield.co.uk/business/asg.htm (looks like it hasent been updated in a while)
http://www.warwickdirectories.co.uk/home

I could probably setup something like that with the local newsagents to be honest, as for the "village books" I have had very limited success in the past, how big is your advert, I think I had one on front page for 6 months and it did relatively little, but I'll be honest I occasionally have a flick through those when they get delivered, but mostly they just get binned immedietly.
I don't mind giving anything a go though as it costs relatively little (I think I paid £150 for 3 months in the past)



1 other thing I enquired with the local radio station, they want something like £100 a month for 3 plays a day, they want some setup costs for the initial advert but they will also get a jingle scripted and recorded for £450
Not sure what to do.
I can say that my competitor has a catchy jingle on there to the tune of ghostbusters, and whenever you play the radio station on line it plays their advert first (every time) before you get tuned in to the station.

 

[jmitservices]

how big is your advert

I normally only go for a quarter of a page. Costs me around £100 to £150 bimonthly per magazine.

 

[Big Jim]

I normally only go for a quarter of a page. Costs me around £100 to £150 bimonthly per magazine.

I contacted the owners of one of the local magazines/books.

They finished it in December 2016, like I said it didn't seem to generate any business for me so I guess other people felt the same and its killed the thing off.