Freshen Up Your 2010 Marketing

Happy New Year!

This is it. The start of a new decade bla bla bla…

So, what are you going to do differently this year? Are you going to move your marketing up a level or will  you just be plodding along as usual?

With the noughties behind us and the teenies stretching before us, now’s the time to review your marketing messages on your website, brochures, newsletters, emails etc.

Don’t go stale

Picture this: Monday morning, you drag yourself out of bed and stagger down stairs. You open the bread bin only to find a hard, stale piece of bread which is slightly green around the edges.

Do you:

a) stick it in the toaster because no one’s ever died from mouldy, past its best bread (yet)

b) chuck it away and find some fresh bread to eat

I’m guessing you’ve gone for option b).

Why? Because the bread is out of date, stale and lifeless.

So if you thought that was a pretty obvious choice to make, why do you leave your website copy and brochures untouched for months, years and (God forbid) decades?

Keep up with the times

Your marketing message will become just as stale as that piece of bread.

The copywriting in your original message was undoubtedly strong and compelling, but even copywriting can’t stand the test of time. You move on, your customers move on, priorities and products change – so why hasn’t your copy?

If you don’t keep your copy updated and relevant you might as well not bother marketing – and we all know what a pickle that’ll get you in to. I wrote a post a while back called 4 Resons Why Copywriting Services Work in which I used a famous example to illustrate why your marketing should continue:

During the depression of 1929-33(ish) Kelloggs in the USA (whose cornflakes were a health food at the time) continued to promote as heavily with adverts, posters etc as they had been doing before that. By the time the depression was over there were no other breakfast cereals that anyone had heard of and Kelloggs achieved almost instant market domination, a position they’ve held ever since.

Time verses profit

I can hear you all now shouting that you don’t have the time to start reviewing and rewriting all your marketing materials. Well, for starters, you don’t have to do it all in one go. Prioritise – start on your website first if that’s the first contact potential clients have with your company.

If you don’t have time, invest in the services of a freelance copywriter – yes, it will cost you but you’ll save time because a) you don’t have to write it yourself and b) because you won’t have to rewrite it because it will work first time because copywriters know what they’re doing.

Using a professional will help you save money and make money – think of it as an investment. You hire new sales people to generate more leads so why not hire a copywriter to produce copy that will generate leads and convert them into buying customers?

Take a look at your website and borchures – ready for a makeover? Start 2010 the way you mean to go on – lean, mean and ready for action.