What's Your Toughest Marketing Challenge?

[Dale King]

Many of my clients have difficulties marketing their businesses, which is why they hire me to help them.

What about you? What's your toughest marketing challenge? And more importantly, what are you doing to overcome it?

Dale King

[chriswick]

Showing on the #1 page for a billion dollar keyword on Google it's something I set myself the long term challenge of doing.

[Dale King]

Okay, so what are you doing to overcome this challenge, Chris?

Dale King

[jasaunders]

For our scrapbook website, our dilemma is who we should market to and how much of our resources we should put into it.

Our target customers are broken into two categories:
1) Women that are avid scrapbookers, already shop online, know about the industry, and have their favorite stores.
2) Women that are beginner scrapbookers or are just looking to make a one-time purchase or project.

Our service offering, while it is attractive to all scrapbookers, is more specialized for beginners who need help.

The problem is that it is very easy to target regular scrapbookers. There are scrapbooking magazines, trade shows, message boards, etc...

It is much harder to target those who aren't currently avid scrapbookers or who aren't currently in the market to buy the product (at least not that they know of). It is obviously easy to target women in general, but the cost is much higher and the conversion rate is much lower. So you will spend much more marketing dollars per customer on non-scrappers.

This is the challenge we are faced with. How much should we allocate to the exisinting industry to win over new customers and how much should we allocate to gaining customers not familiar with the industry and how do we do it?

We are effectively marketing to group one, but still working on much better and affordable ways to market to group two. Some things we are doing are:
1) Partnership with ivillage.com (largest women's web portal on the internet) to be the exclusive supplier of scrapbook supplies in their new online store.
2) Listing our products on gift websites that help people find gifts for certain occassions. We have recently listed on findgift.com, pronto.com, and are in the process of being listed on gifts.com.
3) We are starting a "scrapbook of the month club" where users receive a package once a month. There are dedicated sites that specialize in "of the month" type clubs, and we plan on utilizing these.

The one thing in the works right now which is geared towards group one, but will also benefit group two, is adding more functionality in our design tool, so that more seasoned scrappers will want to use our tool.

[Dale King]

jasaunders, those are all great ideas you have for overcoming your marketing challenge. I have another idea:

Why not write a series of FREE special instructional reports for group two, and set them up on auturesponders, making each subsequent report a little bit more advanced than the previous one.

This would serve two purposes:

1. It would allow you to inexpensively market to group two, although the free special reports wouldn't appear to be marketing, which is another advantage.

2. It would allow you to educate group two and gradually bring them up to the level of group one.

Dale King

[Terra Andersen]

One of the biggest marketing challenges I found found with most businesses I have been involved in is not bringing in traffic to the website, but bringing in TARGETED traffic. It seems sometimes we think we knew our market, but then we were all wrong!

To do this, I implemented surveys from past purchasers to find out more information on who they were and their purchasing habits. This gave us a MUCH better scope of who our client really was.

[Dale King]

Surveys are a good idea, Terra.

Dale King

[The Stealthy One]

My toughest challenge has not been in defining who I'm targeting, but in reaching them.

[Paint and Air Sportz]

My toughest challenge has not been in defining who I'm targeting, but in reaching them.

I 100% agree, with my new outdoor advertising company, i focus on coorporate clients, and with huge companys you cant nessecarially walk into their offices and give a sales pitch you have to find the right person in the company or they have to find you.



Now since my company is very niche, as it deals with Segway advertising street teams. After my first event with 7-11 (i got the client because a family member is in their PR department) I will be writing up a press release and sending it to all the advertising journals such as AdWeek as well as all the NY media. And hopefully it gets picked up and a story or two is written about me or my company and then if their is a article in say adweek then it will be read by a huge amount of advertising and marketing executives who will hopefully hire me.

And I also plan on advertising in Adweek as it gets into the hands of the people who would hire my company.

[Dale King]

This is exactly what I was looking for guys.

Keep 'em coming!

Dale King