384: Making the Most of Physical Marketing
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How are you using physical marketing? We dive into the importance of using more than a digital approach. We explore different marketing options and how to make the most out of each. It starts with knowing your target client, so you can craft relevant materials and speak to their needs. We also share our recent experiences, and some lessons we’ve learned. All of this is for naught unless you’re being strategic and tracking results to grow smarter.
Main topics
Benefits of Physical Marketing
Different Types
Making the most of it
Integrating Physical and Digital Marketing
Tracking and Growing Smarter
Main takeaway: Even in a digital world, physical marketing still plays a major role. By understanding your audience, you create a comprehensive and effective marketing approach that helps grow your business strategically.
Links:
Episode 372: www.petsitterconfessional.com/episodes/372
Advertising Methods: https://www.petsitterconfessional.com/Advertising
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A VERY ROUGH TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
Provided by otter.ai
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
people, postcards, clients, put, flyers, pet sitters, print, marketing, physical, materials, company, talk, promotional materials, events, digital marketing, pet, tennis balls, service, relevant, business cards
Collin 00:03
Welcome to pet sitter confessional, and open and honest discussion about life as a pet sitter. Thank you so much to today's sponsor, pet sitters associates and our wonderful Patreon supporters. If you would like to learn of all the ways that you can help support the show, you can go to pet sitter professional.com/support. On Episode 372, we discussed making the most out of your local digital marketing. Well, today, we're going to talk about making the most out of physical marketing. We've actually built a section on our website that lists the most common forms of advertising that people do, we sent out a survey to our listeners and in our Facebook community, we put together all their responses and compiled them together, then that's at petsitter confessional.com/advertising. We're focusing on physical marketing, because it's really not something that most people think about. In our digital world, print and physical may not seem like they play a role, but they really do. These, these types of marketing can still be highly beneficial to you for a variety of reasons. The first one is targeted reach, print marketing materials, such as flyers, brochures, direct mail, these can all be easily distributed within a specific geographic region, which allows you to target your advertising efforts to a precise audience. This is critical for the kind of businesses that we run, given that most of us spend a lot of time stressing about service radius service areas, and whether it's in the right place, or whether we're spending too much time because it's too big, or it's too small. And a lot of cases, it doesn't make sense for us to put out TV advertising or radio advertising because these go miles and miles, I mean, three, five hours next state away, that doesn't do our little businesses any good because I can't get to those people. So instead, taking this marketing approach that stays hyperlocal that can be directed to people at a specific location really allows us to make our advertising dollars go a lot further. It also helps you reach areas that you are trying to grow and specifically so if you've ever driven by that gated community or that country club or the area where you know, a lot of high net worth individuals are or where a lot of the the nurses or the school teachers live and gone, how do I get you? Where are you while they're right there, so you can actually go to them in that instance of putting your material in front of them in the places that they go. Second thing that makes it extremely powerful is that it is tangible to unlike digital marketing, print materials offer a physical presence that can be held, touched, saved and passed on. This tangible aspect can make stronger impression on customers, as well as providing a lasting reminder of your business, which increases brand recognition and super importantly here, recall, I don't know about you, but if you've ever been on Facebook, or been on a website when searching the internet and gone Oh, that thing's pretty cool. And you go I'll remember that for later. And then later comes in and you go well, I remember that I saw it. But I don't know what website it was on. I don't remember what Facebook group it was. I don't remember anything about its location. This is a major problem. And it's an experience that we do not want our potential clients to have. Having something in their hands with your name on it with your information allows them to recall it a lot easier. When there is a physical representation of your company in their hands, in their home, in their car, that they can either then use or pass on to somebody pass to a friend or a neighbor because they know they have that problem. And it's so much easier to share that way as well. print marketing often carries a sense of authenticity and professionalism that some digital advertising lacks. Because anybody can put up a social media post, it kind of reduces the value that any one post has, but printing something out and mailing it that takes effort and work that takes money that takes input, especially high quality print materials, these can establish you as a trustworthy as reliable service provider in the minds of your consumer. So this credibility aspect comes into play. When we talk about our print, we'll talk about our physical marketing. Additionally, we can imbue some of the characteristics that we want as a company into these products. You may describe yourself as a premium service or an elite service, the premier the high end service for people, you can imbue some of those qualities into the materials and the products that you're putting out there with your name on it. So let's take a postcard. You can buy super cheap, really thin cardstock that makes it like blow in the wind. Or you can pay for the really thick, nice good high quality materials in that postcard. So when people feel see touch, interact with that, that that idea of premium can come to their mind and they can start associating you your company and the services that you offer with this premium high quality product that they have in their head. And because there's been a surge of digital marketing, print advertising has actually become less saturated with companies trying to market there. So as a result, you actually have an opportunity to stand out with well designed to print marketing materials or physical products that you are producing. Consumers may also appreciate a break from digital noise and give more attention to the products that you're putting out there. And I say products, we're not selling things here, but our promotional materials, that's probably a better word for me to use. So you can put out those flyers, the brochures, the business cards, the postcards, you can also have the promotional materials, you sure you can have pens, you can have waterfalls, you can have tennis balls, you can have kubek holders, the variation is wide. And it takes you understanding a lot about who your clientele are, what you want to be associated with and a potential problem that you're trying to solve through those promotional materials. And all of this ties up in the fact that print marketing can complement and reinforce your digital marketing efforts, which allows you to create a more comprehensive and effective total marketing strategy, this integrated approach. By using a mix of print and digital marketing, you can ensure you reach a wider audience while also providing multiple touchpoints for potential customers to engage with you and your company. So continue to do your digital marketing, your Facebook posts, your Facebook ads, and run those then have complementary physical representations of your company in your community so that they can see your logo on a Facebook post. And then they see your logo and their coffee shop and their logo with your yoga studio and your logo on a t shirt and other places. It builds this brand awareness and really helps seat you as top of mind in people in your community. That's why print marketing and physical marketing is still relevant these days. What are your options? How can you implement what are some things that you can do? Well, I think the first one that comes to mind, for most people are business cards, they pretty much have been a staple ever since. I don't know, before the printing press like it's been a long, they've been around for a really long time. But that's because they have a staying power because they are affordable. And they are an effective way to share essential information and create a professional image for you and your company, that you can distribute them easily during networking events, meetings, in store interactions, when you're getting gassed when you're buying other things, they ensure that your potential clients have a physical reminder of your business. And the key words there that you have to hone in on are essential information, you have to make sure that they do not get too busy. And it's exceptionally easy to do with business cards because they're so small. And this really goes with any kind of print material or print advertising that we're gonna be talking about today. But people love to cram a bunch of words, especially in different fonts, but less is truly more. So remember that saying, kiss every time that you want to add another text box, or increase the size of something, really trying to ask yourself, what is the essential aspect of what I'm trying to get across here. For us, we don't use traditional business cards, we use business cards that are actually magnets. So for us, it's even more important because we just get one side of the business card to display our information. So we have to think through what must be get across what kind of feelings, emotions, imagery are we trying to conjure? With this physical reminder of our business that's gonna go in somebody's pocket, it's gonna go on their refrigerator or some other aspect of their home. Then there are flyers and brochures. These are highly versatile marketing materials. And they can be used to promote anything that you're selling. Like if you have products that you're selling, you're trying to get into that your services events that you're hosting, or special offers that you're trying to promote throughout the year in different times and seasons. You can distribute these directly in the mail placed in strategic locations handed up directly to potential customers. And for these a key aspect is to make sure that you use good eye catching design and clear messaging that can help generate interest and drive engagement, because flyers and brochures have a tendency to just fade into the background of general clutter when people encounter them. And this is because most people use a white background with black text. But instead using good good photos that aren't blurry, simple text that's elegant, that matches the kind of brain and style that you're trying to use, and using them strategically in set locations. So this is where having good partnerships with physical locations with pet food stores, yoga studios, coffee shops, anything else like that in your community. You can go and station these there to be a representation of you in there. And to do this, we've actually talked about this on a previous episode. But don't just come in and say Hey, can I put this flyer in your store? You can try that in some places. Maybe just fine with them and actually talk to the person let them know why you're there, be upfront with it. And then when it comes to the end Ask instead of asking, Can I put my flyer in your window? Simply ask, Do you have a community board or a place for people to put information about events or their business, this takes the pressure off of the owner of the establishment. So instead of denying you, they'll they're just denying the existence of a community board. And it's okay. And it allows much for an easier out during the interaction and makes it a lot less awkward. And then the other key to this is, if somebody does allow you to put them somewhere, take the flyer, take the brochure to them and allow them to look at it before you place it on their counter or in their window. This is going to engender a lot of trust and help build relationships with these. I'll also add here that with flyers and brochures, you might also consider sending out physical newsletters. I know Dominic Hodgson is really big on sending physical newsletters to people. This allows for you to send updates yes about your company, you can write specific articles about training or food products or things that you're working on. But it's a great high end touch that allows them to be reminded of your company. And then they can take that and pass that on to somebody, it kind of adds an extra perk of something coming to them. Once they are a client of yours. Working out our size class up, we had business cards, we had flyers, and we had brochures. And now we're going to talk about posters and banners. These can be used to create a visual impact and capture attention from potential customers in located set locations, you can display them once again in store windows, at events, this is really big, if you're going to be doing a lot of events, take the time to consider what kind of posters, what kind of banners you would want to have to display where you're going to be, what kind of information needs to be there is it just the name of your company? Is it promoting something and an activity and event that you are trying to sponsor, you can change them up. And so it actually recommended to not just use the same thing over and over and over and over again. Because people get used to that. And you are changing, you have new things that you want to talk about your your design your the elements of your business, your branding will grow and change over time. So don't be afraid to change things up as you grow. And as you have different things that you want to talk about. And these are really good for building brand recognition and general interest in people in your community. Maybe you want a sponsor a ballpark, and they're seeking donations or seeking sponsorships and one of the perks is to put one of a banner on the bid on the outfield, you know, on the on the fences, or a playground or a dog park, even that would allow you to put these things up to talk about your company. One subcategory of something like this would be sponsoring poop bag stations. So in our community, we have put back stations at all of our local parks. We approached the parks department and said, Hey, we know you have these put back stations out there, could we pay to have a sign logo positioned on the public station somewhere so that people would know that we helped offset the costs for those. And they were super excited about this? And we're actually in the middle of those, those talks and that progress for what it can mean now? Do we expect that to be the one thing that unlocks all of the hidden clients and potential clients in our community? No, we recognize that. But is it a great way to get in front of people who are the living the kind of lifestyle that we want to target taking the dogs to parks out in the public. So they're responsible dog owners, and they're picking up the poop after them. That's a great segment that we want to have included in our type of clientele. Additionally, it helps build brand awareness about our company and that we are trying to make our community just a little bit better by helping to pay for poop bag stations and help alleviate the amount of poop that's left behind in the park so more people can enjoy them. Did you get your mail today? How many? If you did, how many direct mailing things or advertisements did you have in your mailbox, they can actually target a specific audience by sending promotional materials like postcards letters directly to their mailboxes, that can actually yield a high response rate and generate leads, especially when the materials are personalized and tailored to the recipients interests or needs. So what's important here is that again, it's tailored, it's personalized. We actually looked into this and are doing a slight variation of direct mailers. We personally did not want to get the cheap mailers with that you see with the generic Hello current resident. It was kind of thing. But that's not personalized. That's not a high end touch that we feel like our company brings it here in the US at least you can work with an ad agency to send out direct mailers, they will usually have a minimum purchase. So in our case, the agency that we were we were talking with they their minimum was 10,000 printed direct mailers. And they charge 20 cents apiece. So yes, that would be two grand dedicated to this, but we could select the exact streets that we wanted to target. We could have input on all of the design I mean, what the material looks like all of that stuff. But here's the thing. One, that's very costly. So can we do something better with that money. And secondly, we, we cannot take on 10,000 clients, we can't even take on 1000 new clients or even really 100 new clients, right? We we need to grow smarter, we want to grow, but we need to grow smarter. And so here's the twist that we started to implement. We first heard about the rule of five postcards our interview with Laura Breakstone on episode 327. What she does, and what we're now doing is you go to an address of a client that you really like maybe they're in a neighborhood that you want to be more involved in, because it's more convenient, or they're the type of clientele that you want, pick that clients address, then pick the address on either side of them. So one on the left one on the right, take those addresses, then pick these three houses that are across the street from them 123. And then you've got four or five, this five total new addresses. And you're going to send them a postcard or a flyer or a brochure or something. And you're going to make it super high quality, not one of those cheap postcards and go for the really thick paper, make it a nice matte finish, super high quality photos and nice simple text. And because it can be very hard to figure out what on earth goes on this thing you can put up, what we've done is we've put a QR code on the front of our postcard that sends them to our website, where all obviously all of our information is. But basically the front of it has a nice full folds print picture that says premier dog walking pet, same company, we are in your neighbor, we serve as your neighborhood, with our email with our website at the bottom. On the back, it lists our four promises, and three pain points that we see common to pet owners that we like to serve. And then it has their name, their address, and then our website again at the very bottom. And we've actually gotten an amazing response from these because it's a physical thing in their in their hands. It's a representation of our company, and it's speaking to their problems and their needs. Is it 100% chance that they're going to get that they're going to have a dog or that they're going to see the usefulness in this. No, it's not but no marketing campaign, no marketing strategy. Actually, it is. Because we want it, we want to keep it we must keep it simple, and we must keep it clean. So say say who you are, and what you do, and really limit the amount of information that you put on these. So they're nice and clean and simple. But make it relevant to the kind of people that you're targeting, and change up the kind of postcards that you use, depending on the kind of service that you are trying to grow. So a daily dog walking postcard is going to look very different than a cat sending postcard which is going to look different than small farm animals or pocket pets. Whatever you're trying to grow, use the postcards to grow appropriately with the messaging that you want. Cost wise, how does this compare with the 10,000 minimum purchase from the ad agency? Well, it's a little over twice the price per postcard sent. So the original price for that mass mailer of 10,000, it was 20 cents per postcard per mailer, when we do it this way, it's working out to about 50 cents, maybe up to 60 cents, depending on how we're getting things printed and the number that we're ordering per postcard. Now, that is a lot of money. But again, we aren't sending 10,000 of these postcards at a time we're sending maybe 20, maybe 25. These are costs that we can absorb that it's a little higher upfront. But we know that the payoff in the end is going to be much better on us, because we can actually meet that need. And that's something to consider throughout this entire conversation that actually we we haven't touched on. We did a little bit with digital marketing. But with digital marketing being basically free, right, it's essentially free for you to do it just takes your time and takes a little bit of creativity to to put that post together with print advertising with physical marketing that is going to cost money to actually have these things printed and created and put out into the world. And so we do have to be highly aware, highly conscious of the fact that what we're doing to make sure that it is a good investment that we aren't just running around and blowing to ground on a bunch of tennis balls, if we're not actually going to be able to know where those tennis balls go or how best to use them. And I've already mentioned the last option here a couple times here, but it's promotional products, things that you can pay for that are going to be branded promotional items like pens, those are really common tote bags, apparel, they're going to help raise your brand awareness and you have to be strategic about this. It's easy to get pens for everybody does pens, do people even need more pens, are they nice high quality pen people can actually use the pen. So we've gone down more of the road of trying to find branded things for pets. So like tennis balls, we have a lot of tennis balls Here's our office that have our name on it, we get put bag holders, their little plastic bone shaped poop bag holders with our name and our logo on them. Things that we can hand out at Pet events or leave behind pet friendly places that are going to help elevate and help make their clients have a better time raising their pets because now there there these free things over here that my dog is going to enjoy. And we'd like to make sure that they aren't just throw away or toss away. We want them to be tangible and to be a constant reminder of your business that can lead to better word of mouth marketing and that are going to last and not just be somebody that are going to throw away immediately. Something that will definitely last is pet business insurance. As pet care professionals, your clients trust you to care for their furry family members, pet sitters Associates is here to help for over 20 years, but service Associates has provided 1000s of members with high quality pet care insurance. If you work in the pet care industry or want to make your passion for pets into a profession, you can take your career to the next level with flexible coverage options, client connections and complete freedom and running your business. Learn why pet sitters Associates is the perfect fit for you and get a free quote today at pets it llc.com You can get a discount. Who doesn't love those when joining by clicking membership, then Pet Sitter confessional and use the discount code confessional at checkout to get $10 off today, check out all the benefits of membership and insurance once again at Pet sit llc.com. We've talked about the power of print and physical marketing. We've given you some ideas of ways to approach this and start doing with direct mailing products, with flyers, postcards, all that stuff. But how do we make the most of this? How do we actually make sure that the the money that we're spending, the time that we're investing in this is actually going to get us some payoff in the end, to get the most out of paper and physical marketing requires a combination of creativity, targeting the right audience and choosing the right channels. So here are some tips for you to start doing that. First one, we got to talk about it, we always talk about it right? What is it, it's understanding your target audience knowing who on earth is on the receiving end of these things. Identify your ideal customer based on things like demographics, interests, and needs. This will help you to actually create, really, for this really powerful world relevant and engaging materials that resonate with your audience. And it's even more important when we're in the physical space as opposed to the digital because we are wanting to go out and get our flyers get our brochures or postcards or mailers or promotional products, those need to get in front of people to good partnerships with local businesses going to the right events, strategically thinking about where are these people going? Where are they driving? Where are they visiting? Where are they spending their money, and then can I get these physical materials in front of them. If I'm choosing not to go the mailing route again, however you want to meet their needs. Then using eye catching designs, where there is a tendency to for flyers, brochures, these things to kind of bit blend into the background of clutter. We've talked about that, because they use boring designs. So invest in high quality, visually appealing designs that stand out and convey your brand identity to even know your brand identity. What do you stand for? What kind of language are you going to use to get your brand across, I use the example earlier of we think of our company is a premium service. So all of the products, all the promotional materials need to be premium, as well. Nice, good, thick, cardstock, matte, good, elegant fonts, all of these things are going to go into conveying that messaging to them. And then keep your messaging clear, concise and easy to understand. We don't want a lot of clutter, cluttered, clear creates confusion, it creates uneasiness, people are less likely to continue reading or using things that it's too cluttered to read. So they don't understand what's going on. And they'll just move past and find something else. Use nice bold colors that match your brand. It readable fonts, and impactful and relevant images. I'm going to harp on fonts here for a little bit how many times you've been driving down the road and seeing a screen printing on somebody's back window. Or you've been looking at a postcard a business card and it's this font that you don't know, is that an F? Is that an L? Maybe it's a D Oh, turns out it's actually an S. We don't want any confusion. While they may look nice. While they may be really pretty, are they practical, these are items that are going to be in front of people for maybe just a few seconds, and they have to get a lot of information and connect with it at that level. And so maybe you have to forego the super fancy script or font that you want to use because you like it. You need to be focusing on the user experience and the client experience with seeing your materials and keep it clear. Don't be a fake afraid of blank space on these products. Let there be breathing room between words between paragraphs between objects and things that you have on these that it's going to help people going to be more relaxed whenever they see these instead of having everything scrunched together in super tight and no tolerance between one thing and the next. That's really, it gives me anxiety just thinking about it. So imagine what that would do to somebody who's in a rush who's in a hurry, leaving a department store and sees this thing over there, and it's just crammed full. Well, we need to cut out right everything and then cut out about half of it. And then about half more. That's what you're gonna go with. We talked about the different methods that you could use. Don't be afraid to utilize all of those different formats. So leverage them, leverage the flyers, the brochures, business cards, posters, postcards, newsletters, use a little bit of all of them in your integrated marketing strategy. Because each format can serve a different purpose, they can reach different segments of your audience, they can, you know, just like in digital marketing, different platforms speak to different people. And we now have physical constraints. So you may want to leave all of your flyers behind. But there might not be space in the coffee shop to leave flyers. So you need business cards for that. Or maybe you're trying to promote a brand new service or talk about an event. Well, that's not very well done on a business card and needs to be in more of a brochure or flyer, but isn't super appropriate for the giant banner that you're posting at the local high school football field. So think about the kind of content that you are wanting to get out there. Think about the format, and then the location of where this is going to be seen or how people are going to interact with it, to make sure that is relevant for the people in that situation. And then we mentioned this one, personalize your materials. We've mentioned this, when talking about postcards, we use the person's name out there, and you can pull these from different address sites or the US Postal Service. Or you can pull people's addresses and their names associated with them to put on here. Whenever possible, tailor your marketing materials to your specific customers or segments of customers. So segments, maybe you don't want to use people's names. So you can just say, pet owner or PA rent or whatever pun that you want to you want to use on there, make it relevant to them, because it's going to create a stronger connection and make your audience feel valued and seen in a service industry like ours, where the know like trust factor is super critical. This, this one step shows that you took the time to make it relevant, and then they can immediately feel connected with you because of it. Another way to get the most out of this kind of marketing is to leverage local events and partnerships. So participate in local events, fairs, festivals, community gatherings, partner with local businesses, to co host events or cross promote each other's products and services that you're having out there. And this can be really difficult, right? This is one that takes time energy effort planning, we're going through that right now, we know that we've got a lot of events in both of our service areas that are coming up later in this year. And we're trying to decide which ones are relevant to us, because we can't go to all of them. We don't want to spend all of that money. But we do want to have a presence. And so we are thinking through given the segment of clients that we're trying to reach. Which ones do we think or know, in some circumstances, which ones are they going to be attending and making sure that we're making those calls correctly. And then for events, maybe you know, that your clients aren't going to be there. But the cause is super critical, it's super important for you to be there personally, at a personal level or your business mission aligns with that event so well, that you have that you feel like you have to go to that event, make sure that they align with your your, your personal values, your your business goals. And then if clients are going to be there, all three of those things need to be swirling around as you make those determinations about what kind of events you're going to go to who you're going to partner with so that you can get these materials in their hands. Another aspect of physical marketing, it's very common is to possibly offer incentives. And I will say this is a topic of a lot of debate. Should you ever discount? Do you offer discounts Do you offer, you know, one to one off pricings or things like that, you need to decide if you will provide special offers or maybe freebies that are inclusive. If they choose to use the code or whatever we have done this were on our fliers will say, you know, for 15% off your first booking, use the special code at checkout. It encourages customers to take action and try your products or services. But it doesn't lock them into a cheaper price forever. And that's really critical. Because you have to think about the lifetime value of that client to you. Is it worth it to you to lose three or $5 per service, if they book you for the first time. If they're very likely to continue to book you after that. That's a judgment call for you. You've got to look at your books, look at your numbers and see what is sustainable for you and whether you're still turning a profit. If we do that for all of our new clients. We'd never make money off of them. If there is a large portion of them who are just one offs, and so you have to decide how are you go into balance that you do not have to offer incentives. You don't have to offer freebies but is a way to get people to to use and take action on your services. We talked about building mailing lists for emails, but you have that mailing list for sending mail, right? You know the addresses of all of your customers and clients. When was the last time you mailed something to them? Do you send them a newsletter promotional materials special offers to keep your business top of mind? Are you sending them birthday cards? Are you sending them get well wishes? Are you sending them? Are you using that resource as an avenue to build relationships there, that's all we're doing here is you can once you have a client, you can now take that mailing list and use it to deepen that relationship and build more connections with them by sending them things, again, a postcard 53 cents, not a lot of money to have that printed off. But it can make a huge impact on somebody. Once we have all of our materials together, we have to distribute them strategically distribute your materials in high traffic areas and places that your target audience is likely to go. Local bulletin boards, community centers, grocery stores, other relevant locations to them. Again, you can't just drive down the road and throw tennis balls or throw poop bag holders throw postcards out the window. It's going to feel like that sometimes, I promise. But that's why our step one in this process was understand who your audience is, Who are you trying to reach, so that you don't just feel like you're doing a big, flying over an airplane and dropping down all of your flyers over your town, that's not going to go very well for you. Instead, having the small locations that you're going to highly targeted, highly intentional placement of these things is really going to help you. And I think the single best thing that you can do. After you've identified who your audiences. Once you have that in and you're actually implementing this, you have to track your results include a call to action in a way to track the success of your marketing efforts, such as a unique coupon code, dedicated phone number for inquiries, key word that they're supposed to use when booking you. Or maybe it's just a questionnaire that you get when you get a phone call. This is part of our intake, if they make a phone call, I have it in my script of at some point, I'm going to say, oh, not only am I going to ask, where are you located? What services are you looking for? How did you hear about us? How did you hear about us today? That goes in a little forum. That's how we're going to track that. If they if they're coming through your website or your software have a little checkmark next to something that says how they found you. Was it a referral? Was it a flyer? Was it a postcard? Was it the billboard that you're doing? Was it a Facebook ad that you ran? If you don't know how effective your campaigns, your your your marketing is going, you're not going to know how to make necessary adjustments, you're going to have no idea of what's out there and where to spend your money. I keep coming back to the tennis balls. But that's because I have them right right over here. But let's say you spent $700 on tennis balls. Once those are all gone, how are you going to know if you need to reorder? Should you reorder? How many should you reorder? What timeline? Are you going to want them back on? All of those questions, because that's a pretty big investment $700 to order a bunch of tennis balls, but you can know confidently Oh, wow, I know I did all those tennis balls, I got XYZ number of referrals from those. And people saw those and people love them. And I got a great response when I had those at the event. I need more tennis balls, because that makes my company better. I get a lot of people who come to my company from the tennis balls, that that allows you to shape and mold and make those the strategic adjustments over time as you spend your money, your money is valuable, right? You don't want to just be blowing all this money out there. That's not the point of doing marketing or doing advertising, whether digitally or physically, the point of advertising is to spend your dollars wisely and strategically to get connected with the clients that you need to be serving and need your services. And so allowing, tracking it having a spreadsheet that you look at once a month, every quarter annually to see what has been working, what kind of changes am I noticing, too, so that you know how to invest your dollars, because all of this is about consistency and tracking what's working. If you're not tracking where people come to you, you won't know where to spend your money. It's about growing smarter. There are literally an infinite number of ways that you can let people know about you through the different marketing and advertising methods. And they all cost money into some extent or just time. So be strategic about it. Last year, we grew a brand new service area and threw money at the wall to see what would stick most of it being perfectly honest. didn't work at all. We tried to go to all of the events. We spent so much money on a bunch of different things that just did not do anything for us. We wasted time, money, energy resources, staff time, our time going down those roads. There This year, we are being strategic. And we are highly targeting the clients that we want through, yes, both digitally, but also through this these physical marketing these physical campaigns that we're putting together, we are not for everybody, right? And you shouldn't be either find your people and go where they are. So in a nutshell, what are we doing? How are we refocusing our efforts for physical and print marketing, we have revamped all of our flyers and our business cards for this year to make them a lot simpler and a lot cleaner in in messaging, we put pricing right up there, first and foremost, on all of our services that we offer, we put the QR codes, we didn't have those on before. But now we do so we can expand the access to information that people have. And we're printing on a really high quality paper. It's not, it's not the cheapest, but we don't want the cheapest, because we aren't the cheapest, that's not the kind of thing that we're going for, we are going to coffee shops in specific areas, we are going to different yoga studios, we're going to different juice bars, we're going to these more high end places. And when we bring in, when we go to these high end places, when we have high end materials to place out, they're more likely to let us do that because it matches what they're going for. And it matches the clientele that they are serving as well. And we've had the tennis balls and put back holders for a while but we were only taking them to events. And it was only relatively recently that we started to leave those at set locations and shops as well to help elevate the presentation of our materials and of our company. And that has been going amazingly, we have getting great responses from the places that we're partnering with to do that. And we have having to restock them on a very regular basis. And people are contacting us, because they saw the tennis balls. That's why That's probably why I keep coming back to that because we've actually seen a great result from that and how we've used them. And then we have been you implementing that rule of five for the postcards and being very strategic about where we want to grow. It's helped us immensely to, to really look at the the geographic distribution of our clients, when you can actually build this out, go to your if you have software, go to your software and export client data, one of those columns is going to be an address column, you can then convert that to a CSV and upload that into your own personalized Google Maps. And this allows you to show these little pins on a geographic location of where everybody is, this will blow your mind it will, it will change how you view your company, I promise you, you have some mental idea mental model of where your clients are. If you actually do this, you will see in stark contrast where people have where you're actually serving people. It showed a lot of holes that we could fill in and focus our attention and energy on areas where we go, oh, you know what we these people are booking us really regularly or this is where we have our daily dog walks. So I need to grow in this area. So I can maximize my time and my resources there because I know it's going to go a lot farther. And it's helped us curtail and really hone in on our service areas. Well while we did this, and so building out those lists of mailing addresses, sending those postcards, we've gotten an amazing response from that as well. And it really only takes one Navy tube, it only takes one person to book a weekend. And we've paid for that entire mailing of postcards, and then some so the payoff comes back pretty quick. And those people have we found our sticky whenever we've done that method as well. So we want to know how you are using physical marketing, and what kind of results or failures that you've come across or things that you've learned through that process. We'd love to know, you can send that to feedback at Pet Sitter confessional.com. We really want to thank today's sponsor, pet sitters associates and our tremendously amazing Patreon supporters for making this show possible. And we really, really want to thank you for listening. We hope this was beneficial to you. And if there's ever a topic that you'd want covered, or maybe somebody that you'd like to be interviewed, including yourself, reach out to us and let us know we'd love continuing the conversation even after the mics have been turned off. We hope you have a wonderful rest of your week and we'll talk to you soon. Bye
