Marketing Q&A

Love the detail of your answer @Steve Gray Thanks for keeping the discussion going @Malcolm Dawes @Keith Dugdale 

Hi,

I have been to a lot of meet ups, BNI etc and met a lot of 'media' people and when I ask them to explain what they actually do their definition of media is all over the place. I have had media explained from printing brochures (and I mean only printing brochures) to all the online media from LinkedIn and Facebook. My question, or more a statement, is say what you do.

"I print brochures..."
'We do SEO.. " is that media ?
"We handle all online Facebook accounts..."
"We help setup your Facebook accounts for you to manage..."
"We manage your blog.."
"Our company handles campaigns...

All to often it takes some time to explain how they can  actually help my company.
By doing this I will get a better understanding if they can help my company or not.
Don't know if that helps answer your question.
Regards

Peter
 

It would be great to also hear your thoughts on this one @Sara Neumann 

Like most things in life, there are pros and cons to automating your marketing. Automation marketing comes in various software that aims to make marketing (and advertising) easier, allowing you time to focus on other aspects of your business. Here are some pros and cons to marketing automation:

Pros:

• Marketing automation can help you generate new sales by developing (and fostering) new leads that you may not have otherwise found.
• Automated message bots on your site (or social media networks) can help customers answer FAQs, not only keeping customers happy and engaged but also assisting you in managing a potentially larger workload. 
• Marketing automation will help you save time for improving your online marketing strategy, refining funnels, and improving customer relations, allowing you to enhance productivity with other aspects of your business. 
• The trend of marketing automation is pointing upwards, with many businesses implementing some marketing automation, whether they realize it or not.

• Marketing automation does cost money, and if you don't set limits can get quite expensive. 
• The messaging system for marketing automation can go awry sometimes and lead to accidental spamming or over messaging. This will lead to unhappy customers and you to potentially be flagged. 
• Automation can depersonalize your brand with generic messaging prompts. 

Interesting question - what's your experience @Eric Sutfin @Laura Tien ?

You can expect to pay a small business marketing consultant around $30 to $300 per hour. The average hourly rate for most marketing consultants ranges from $45 to $60 an hour.

We have previously answered a similar question that provides the hourly rates for a marketing consultant and goes into more depth on what to look for when determining a marketing consultant worth doing business with. 

I think Marketing is great, I enjoy speaking to different businesses at different levels. Its an ongoing improvement process where one engagement teaches, prepares and creates your next opportunity. It is a wonderful feeling knowing that you have provided a solution to a client that has solved their business problems. I am getting to a stage where I firmly believe that you are in the market space to create products/services for your customers. Not find customers for your products or services. Marketing at ground level can be hard yakka and quite frustrating at times, I spend hours on the phone canvassing business and being rejected all the time. But when I do find that one client that has a need that I can provide a solution to. Its game on to find the best possible solution for that new client. Its always an exciting time to meet new business opportunities. Most of all what I have learnt is sell your products to people who 1. Need it 2 want it 3 should use it 4 and will tell their friends about it. And most importantly benefit more from it than the investment they put it.

It depends how scalable and what type of niche your product is in. If you are a specialised b2b company you are only going to have a specific number of customers, for example if its a niche product with 1000 customers. If you are a main stream market like a mobile phone or a supermarket you can spend 150 million a year on advertising in Australia, yet the b2b might only spend $10,000. So my answer is it depends on the company.