£1000 marketing budget - how to spend it?

[franktailor]

Hello all,

I recently set up a small formal menswear brand, suits, shirts, ties etc – predominantly targeted at the young professionals market (but not to the point of excluding other areas of the market). We have now decided to launch our first store after receiving some external funding and will be launching at the end of this month. We have a relatively small £1000 marketing budget (in addition to £200 for printing promotional material) for the first month/pre-launch and I am looking at all options, so I just wondered if anyone else had any ideas how they would spend it if they were in my position? We sell online too so Google adwords will also be important.

I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Thanks,


Jamie

 

[james_firmsites]

Adwords all the way with that, make sure you have goal tracking setup and have proper management of the budget (don't just give it to google to spend!)

 

[businessfunding]

Before you decide on the medium, think about the target & the message

you have started to define your target audience but immediately stepped back - you need to define them more, not less

How old are they? What job do they do? Where do they hang out? What are their hobbbies

That will help you to decide on your message - what turns them on? Who are their icons etc?

I would invest part of your budget with a professional marketeer who can help you to understand these things (most will have a no-cost meeting to chat things through)

It will make your promotion 1,000,000% more effective

 

[ethical PR]

As Business Funding said, there's no point in investing your budget in something like Ad Words without first having clearly defined who your customers are, what sets you apart in a very crowded market place and the best communications routes to take within your budget to reach your target audience.

Absolutely agree that it would be a good investment to have a day or so of a marketeers/PR persons time to help you put together an outline plan.

To make the most of their time do think through your objectives, have clearly defined ideas of your target customers, your brand positioning and what sets you apart from your competitors.

Have a look at Marketing Donut, - great free content on steps you need to take to put a marketing plan together.

By the way how did you identify a budget of £1000 without having a marketing plan in place which identifies which marketing activity you would need to carry out to launch and then have sustained marketing activity in place to promote a new brand?

 

[franktailor]

Thanks guys, some interesting comments and I think the assistance of someone with a little more expertise in the area will definitely be something we seek - particularly when setting up the adwords. We identified the budget because that is all we have to spend, so we will now look to prepare a marketing plan around this.

 

[Talay]

Local leaflet advertising is a waste of time for this unless you have a terribly regional centric target market, which I do not think you have. So drop any ideas of leaflets and flyers door to door as 99% will miss your target market.

In the printed medium, you could consider a placement within a monthly regional magazine. I use these to some success with the following group: http://www.roundandabout.co.uk/

If you have a physical store (not totally clear from your post) then you need to work on driving footfall to the store and achieving some brand recognition. As the costs associated with renting a shop are far higher than any online costs, then pushing that would be my main objective.

 

[james_firmsites]

Surprised the number still recommending print advertising for this. Very hard to track and get good ROI especially with a budget of £1000. Trying to target a young professionals male demographic in my mind means web advertising, these are likely to be tech savvy people who I doubt would be looking at local and regional print media.

 

[HostLoveUK]

Very wisely as £1,000 will disappear very quickly! Make sure whatever you adopt that it will 110% reach your target audience & encourage them to 1 - spread the word, 2- boost your brand & finally the most important 3 - purchase! Good luck

 

[Jet Virtual]

Definitely adwords and definitely pay an expert to manage it for you.

 

[businessfunding]

Surprised the number still recommending print advertising for this. Very hard to track and get good ROI especially with a budget of £1000. Trying to target a young professionals male demographic in my mind means web advertising, these are likely to be tech savvy people who I doubt would be looking at local and regional print media.

I don't think anyone has specifically recommended print - the consensus is that the medium should follow the primary considerations.

What stats do you have to support your views?

 

[Betterprinter]

Hello all,

I recently set up a small formal menswear brand, suits, shirts, ties etc – predominantly targeted at the young professionals market (but not to the point of excluding other areas of the market). We have now decided to launch our first store after receiving some external funding and will be launching at the end of this month. We have a relatively small £1000 marketing budget (in addition to £200 for printing promotional material) for the first month/pre-launch and I am looking at all options, so I just wondered if anyone else had any ideas how they would spend it if they were in my position? We sell online too so Google adwords will also be important.

I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Thanks,


Jamie

Hi Jamie,

If your on a budget for print and need quality print at a good price the try us. We can help assist you in all aspects of print from Litho, Digital and Large format printing with free UK delivery on all products. You can get a quick quote price free online without calling up anyone.
Find us at betterprinting.co.uk

If you do need to speak to anyone then we are contactable and based in the UK.

Hope this helps.

Betterprinting

 

[Jadepolecs]

Hi Jamie,

Have you thought about going down the cold calling route? Or an email campaign?

Jade

 

[Fred_the_frog]

I guess I fall under the 'Young Professionals' market? (19 year old trainee accountant!)

I would say Facebook is a good bet. All the people I know at work are on Facebook and use it pretty regularly. Twitter not so much.

I wouldn't recommend fliers or anything. I wouldn't expect to see a flier from an expensive suit shop so I wouldn't expect to see one from you. Make sure your online shop has lots of pictures and goes into good detail on the products. Then maybe offer a free 'consultation' in store to help the person choose the correct fit (I would never order a suit online without first trying it on (actually I did once, I ordered about three different suits each in two sizes but all of them went back because I either didn't like it or it didn't fit!)).

I would also recommend getting your advert in front of me as much as possible. The company 'A suit that fits' put adverts in front of me (On Youtube and Facebook, and adverts from Adsense) a lot and I eventually clicked on their website and had a look round.

 

[Fred_the_frog]

Are all of your products listed on your website? I can only see two suits?

I took a look at the site and I think you need to change the pictures a bit. Your current picture:

isn't that great in my opinion. I can't see much of the suit. I like the pictures of the models wearing the suits, so I would recommend you use some of that money to take proper pictures, and the picture on the page that lists the products should be of a model wearing the suit- much more likely to make me click seeing how it looks on someone than seeing it folded up.

 

[Chris Ashdown]

if your looking at a local shop then one idea I have is to get a few thousand beer mats made up with a modern logo and text and give away to the trendy bars in town, probably the easiest way to get to the under 30 guys

 

[Scott-Copywriter]

Copywriting and conversion rate optimisation.

If you aren't absolutely sure that your website is set up to convert target visitors into customers at a respectable rate, then you could completely waste every single penny of that money.

Always, always check that your website will work correctly in this manner. Just because it looks nice, it doesn't mean that the conversion rate is going to be any good. If it's at 1%, then you'll get one customer out of every 100 visitors. If it's at 4%, then you'll get 4 customers out of every 100 visitors. The percentages might not look that different, but at 4%, you're going to get QUADRUPLE the number of sales from all of your visitors throughout the entire life of your business. It's monumentally important.

Once you've got that nailed down, go with Adwords. Most of the marketing people have mentioned here is pro-active in that it gets your promotional message in-front of people who haven't shown an interest in your products yet. This can be an uphill struggle at times.

Adwords is reactive marketing. It gets your business in front of people who are actively looking to buy formal menswear at that exact moment. Can you see how much easier it would be to sell to those people?

For the offline 'brick and mortar' shop, get some flyers made and get out there meeting people in the street. Also contact other shops which sell companion products and see if you can do some cross-promotion (i.e. you promote their offer and they'll promote yours).

 

[johno123]

With a small budget such as this then carefully chosen promotional gifts are very effective. Choose the right gift and it will keep advertising your business for a long time and be seen by thousands. It's a numbers game so you want a lot of items that are either useful and will be kept or different an will be kept. Depending on where your shop is will depend on the ideal giveaway. Trolley coins are cheap and are retained if given to the correct recipient. Umbrellas are great to get your logo across and are always kept - especially with our unpredictable weather!

 

[VoodooSMS]

Hi Jamie,


I would recommend you use bulk SMS marketing to send in store offers to your customers. Bulk SMS is quick and simple and it almost guarantees that the recipient will open and read the promotion as 91% of adults keep their phones within arm’s reach 24/7.

Moreover, our bulk SMS prices are very competitive (you won't pay more than 3.3p per message) meaning that your small marketing budget can go a long way

I hope this has helped. If you need any more help feel free to contact me or visit our website

Thanks,

Alice - VoodooSMS

 

[ethical PR]

Not much point posting a sales post months after the OP asked the original question

 

[jf-financial]

Do you have time on your hands to get involved with the marketing yourself or not? If you do I would get involved at building up a social media presence alongside the above suggestions as I would think your target market of young professionals would fit that well

 

[altwebdesign]

Message, Market, Media - not necessarily in that order, all as important as each other, if a campaign falls short, its probably down to one of these 3.

Take a look at this from Moe Nawaz, this is a campaign he did for a very high end store, but you could of course tweak it to your business/market: http://moenawaz.com/case-studies-2-parking-prank/

 

[VoodooSMS]

Not much point posting a sales post months after the OP asked the original question

It still might be helpful, and since it has been a few months perhaps the business has grown and is in a position where sms marketing might be of use

 

[telemax]

Cripes I didn't realise the OP was that old.

 

[Blood Lust]

Hello all,

I recently set up a small formal menswear brand, suits, shirts, ties etc – predominantly targeted at the young professionals market (but not to the point of excluding other areas of the market). We have now decided to launch our first store after receiving some external funding and will be launching at the end of this month. We have a relatively small £1000 marketing budget (in addition to £200 for printing promotional material) for the first month/pre-launch and I am looking at all options, so I just wondered if anyone else had any ideas how they would spend it if they were in my position? We sell online too so Google adwords will also be important.

I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Thanks,

Jamie

Purchase a £50 drag and drop website creation kit off PC World. Use their stock art for the general look of the website. Grab a digi camera, lay suits onto plane white backgrounds, photo and upload. The packages normally cost about £10 a year for the rental of the domain name.

Link it to your facebook page, get all your friends and family to add it, ask them to encourage their friends and families to add it, etc.

Generate yourself some publicity to let people know about your free store. Maybe use a few hundred on a charitable event in the local community. Let your radio station know about it and they will likely give you free mentions if its for a good cause.

A good target is war vets. They all wear suits when they attend war memorials on the 11th November. Another good targets are golf clubs (the men have money). You'll have ideas of your own for likely targets.

Finally ask yourself have visable and noticable your shop is to the local population. Is it in the town centre or an obscure side street? If lots of people are likely to pass it then spend your remaining marketing budget on search engine optimisations. If you need to draw attention to yourself then a simple cheap advert in your local paper run every week is more effective then putting all into a one off advert. As sales come in you can then go for something a bit more elaborate on a weekly basis.

BL

 

[Love2travel]

Listen to businessfunding and once you get that down I would go with Facebook because you can target church goers, seniors in high school and tons of other people that would wear your suits.
Good luck

 

[SamiKhan]

Hello all,

I recently set up a small formal menswear brand, suits, shirts, ties etc – predominantly targeted at the young professionals market (but not to the point of excluding other areas of the market). We have now decided to launch our first store after receiving some external funding and will be launching at the end of this month. We have a relatively small £1000 marketing budget (in addition to £200 for printing promotional material) for the first month/pre-launch and I am looking at all options, so I just wondered if anyone else had any ideas how they would spend it if they were in my position? We sell online too so Google adwords will also be important.

I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Thanks,


Jamie

Hi Jamie,
If you need a honest reply £1000 is nothing. But let's start with some basics. It all depends on your short term and long term goals, identification of target market and your marketing Mix (Product, Price, Place, Promotion)

Now let me explain further:

I hope you are already clear about your target market and as you mentioned they are young professionals. Which means you should consider online media as suggested by someone in this forum. But I must suggest you to divide your budget between short term and long term goals. You need a quick response which you can get by PPC (provided managed properly). For long term strategy you should work out on SEO as at some point of time you will start receiving orders with investing much in marketing. By PPC you will start to know what type of people are buying your shirts. Which shirt type (S,M,L,XL) you sell much? If people are not buying then why they are not buying? I mean PPC will not just help in sales but it is also a good research tool to understand your market and website performance.
May I ask name of your online business, so that I can better analyse and give you some suggestions?
Free advise is always welcomed

 

[MojoPromotions]

Hi Jamie,

I would suggest spreading your marketing budget across a couple of different mediums. Online marketing is important however can often be done with minimal cost, time is the key there! If you launch the store I would recommend some branded packaging for the sold items, this could be as simple as a printed bag with tissue paper & a branded sticker. Moo cards offer low quantity stickers that are great quality! It would also be worth having some business cards & flyers produced.

Ellis

 

[LeafletsInLincs]

Adwords, facebook, social media marketing, online newspapers etc

I wouldn't bother with any form of print other than some form of leaflet for those that have already bought from you.

 

[DvanBins]

I would go with Facebook advertising on this one. You can be incredibly specific in who you target. Also, it enables you to get in front of people who wouldn't ordinarily think to google search for a suit..

 

[zevi]

As everyone has been saying, you need to know your target marketing. Once you have that, you can determine the best platform, that may well be Facebok Advertising