Plan the work - and work the plan - Part 1!

Marketing, if it’s to be effective, needs to be strategic – not ad hoc. That means you need some kind of a plan and a system as well as some good materials.

To have any hope of getting your message across and generating some business you need to plan your approach and contact people in as many ways as possible without being a pain.

Over the next few weeks I’m going to try to share some of my experience in marketing to help you develop just such a plan so you can try it out (or bits of it) if you think it might help.

I like direct mail as a starting point. It’s a lot more comfortable than going door-to-door or cold calling! You can put it all together in the safety of your own home and then when you make more personal contact at least they know who you are and what you’re about (assuming your mailing is relevant and interesting enough that they don’t just drop it straight in the bin! – we’ll work on that at a later date!).

Direct mail works on very small percentages. You send out a hundred letters and you may only get one or two responses. But that’s enough to work with. And it’s profitable if it leads to the kind of business you are looking for.

First of all, MAKE A LIST!

Decide who you want to contact to tell them about your products or services. Yellow pages is good for this (in the UK) www.yell.com. – but there are loads of sources. Check out the library for ideas. Or your local paper.

In Yellow Pages, you can define a locality or a region and produce the names and addresses of the organisations you can contact eg art galleries, bookshops. From there, you can widen your search to other, related categories eg art dealers and publishers.

If you want to do a really proper job, you can phone each organisation and get a contact name – direct mail works so much better when it’s personalised.

Keep the phone number, too, so you can make a telephone follow-up.

Think creatively, too. Who else might be interested in hearing about your work?
If you keep your categorisation quite broad to start with, you might find all sorts of organisations you hadn’t thought of. In Yellow Pages, “Arts” brings up:

Arts & Crafts
Books
Cinema & Film
Dance
Drama
Music
Photographic Equipment
Visual Arts

(For instance, I'm really keen to work with dance companies to do backdrops for them)

Might any of these be groups or individuals you’d like to work with? Or simply have some connection with? Maybe it would just be useful to get yourself known among some of these organisations. (Oh, Peter Birch … I’ve heard of him … I was thinking of getting him into my kids’ school to do a few art lessons. That’s actually happened, by the way!)

On a practical note … keep your list organised and keep a note of who you mail out to, who you follow-up etc. BUT don’t get bogged down in being technical about this. You don’t need to set up a complex database (and get totally distracted by doing that!) … just be a bit organised.

Anyway, enough for now. Just some thoughts … hope they help!