Marketing Strategies: Should You just use the Already Done for You Prepackaged Marketing Materials?

Using the prepackaged already available marketing materials is certainly the easy thing to do. But it isn’t necessarily the best thing to do, or the most cost effective thing to do. There are several things you should consider before making the investment to buy and send out these standard materials.

Your first concern is who you are actually marketing for. Yes, you may be able to add your name and contact information to the brochure or advertising reprint; but you’re really advertising an underwriter or an association not yourself. The whole point of marketing yourself is to get people to connect with you and only you.

Your second concern is the ability of the material to grab attention and interest. Quite often these materials are just too bland or too trite. They don’t have a specific message for a specific group of people that really gets them to want to know more.

What you may want to consider is customizing the available marketing materials and making them your own. You should be less concerned about the quality of the printing and more concerned about the value of the content. Develop your own content rich report or white paper and use it as a lead generation source.

Think of marketing as a filtration process. You want to get the attention and interest of your best qualified leads, and sort out the rest. Instead of sending the information first consider offering your valuable information upon request.

With this approach you first send a much less expensive marketing piece or even a classified add with a call to action to request your report. This gets your best leads to raise their hand and connect with you. Provide several options for requesting and receiving the information in your call to action.

When you customize your marketing materials you need to develop a very specific list of people to contact. You contact far fewer people at once. You have a reasonable number of people to contact on a weekly basis. And you get a far greater return on your investment.

Sending prepackaged marketing materials to generic lists is simply lazy marketing. When you use the tactics of a lazy marketer you’ll get the expensive poor results of a lazy marketer. Stop being lazy and be a smart marketer filling your appointment book with qualified valuable leads that result in business.