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Pittsburgh Companies Demand Proven Results for Every Dollar Spent in this Bad Economy
By bryan | November 17, 2008
Tough times have hit Pittsburgh and the surrounding areas. This is especially true for smaller local businesses. Here’s a few case studies we’ve noted in the past few months:
- A small mattress store with negative revenues forced to lay off most of their work force.
- A car transportation company destroyed because car sales are so low there are no cars to deliver.
- Mortgage companies reaching out for alternative funding sources because the regular sources are no longer viable.
- Trade schools not being able to pull in students that live more then 30 minutes away because they can not afford the gas to go to school
So what are these companies doing to make it through difficult times and adjust to this new market?
They are working over their budgets. And more specifically they are monitoring their marketing funds very closely. They are only spending on proven marketing with known results. Everything else is on the chopping block, or they are looking for measures to track how their money is spent to ensure effectiveness.
We recommend finding ways to track all your marketing both online and off. This will require coordination between all of your marketing avenues as well as affordable tools and creative methods of marketing. In the long run the time and attention will yield big returns for your company. We often hear from business owners that they speculate 25% of their marketing is truly effective, but those same business owners can not tell exactly what 25% of the marketing is working or whether they had a good return on investment.
When you track your marketing dollars you can better identify those marketing avenues that work. In addition to identifying good avenues to use you can weed out the bad. This could free up funds to better exploit those marketing areas online or off that are working effectively.
Many of our clients biggest cut backs have been with phone book advertising, radio, trade shows, and print (direct mail). There has also been a cry of frustration from companies that try internet advertising in conjunction with any of the phone book advertising companies. Most have had horrible, costly, results, due to poor setup and planning.
We understand exactly how frustrating this is because we’ve tried the same methods and gotten the same terrible results. We’ve all read about how online marketing is the most cost effective strategy for marketing, but the results just haven’t been justified. What’s worse is that we know online marketing works, because everyday small businesses are losing contracts or jobs from people shopping them online.
Higher Images offers an extensive set of affordable tools that help you track many stages and types of marketing. Plus we have an extensive knowledge on how to market online. Gives us a call and let us show you how to better leverage your marketing funds today!
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