That said, we DO market the business… we twitter, facebook, and keep a blog. We also have a monthly newsletter that goes out through constantcontact. We use these tools to occasionally promote a special or new product, but we mostly use them to connect to our customers and build loyalty. Our newsletter isn’t just a coupon or new item; we include relevant local information, recipes, and shop news. I’ve found our customers are a lot more likely to forward those newsletters to a friend than the ones that look like an ad.

We also participate in a lot of fundraisers for local non-profits, which draws people as well.

Basically, we try to keep our focus on our customers instead of touting how awesome we are, and we make sure that our customers notice it.

I hope this helps out!
Kat

Ha! The first time I had a small leather goods business I thought of printing t-shirts with my company name and logo and giving them away to homeless people all aver NYC.

Those are my two reasons for not advertising every month. I’d been doing pretty this year until this month, though. I hadn’t seen any results, from it so I was getting discouraged. It’s hard to have an extremely limited budget and spend money on advertising that doesn’t appear to be work. That’s when I wrote you.

One thing I’m sure of: I spent waaaay too much money on advertising. Next time around I won’t do any magazine or radio ads at all (I owned a shop in Wichita, Kansas and didn’t have an online storefront, so all my advertising was local) and I won’t advertise in the phone book. The only print advertising I did that seemed to have any effect whatsoever were small ads in the “Wichitalk” insert of the local paper. Ironically these were also the least expensive.

I worked with good advertising sales reps and bad ad sales reps, and at the time I trusted some of the good ones … but I shouldn’t have. One of the bigger disappointments was a full-page ad I took out for the first two issues of a new local magazine targeted at 20- and 30-somethings interested in local food, shopping, and entertainment–just my demographic, I thought. The ads were expensive (even with the rate they gave me, which was 50% off what they supposedly charged everyone else) and yielded maybe one or two customers.

My recommendation for others in my situation would be to think very carefully about the print advertising you buy and spend a lot of time making the actual ad perfect (and even more importantly, very well representative of your product/store/service).

I tried a few other things, none of which worked well. Another mistake I made was trusting my marketing firm, which supposedly was a think-outside-the-box sort of place but in practice kept me spending money on media that I didn’t need (but which they got a commission for).

The good news? Everything that worked for me was cheap or free. I got tons of press for unusual events or specials (a cheese ball contest, holiday wrapping parties, “Champagne Saturdays” during the holiday season). Social networking was also tremendously effective: I would estimate that 8-10% of sales in December could be attributed to our Twitter presence.

Next time around I will be spending a lot of time looking at some of the online advertising options suggested here. I did start blogging with a vengeance last fall and promoted that a little bit online. The initial results were pretty positive.

Hope this helps!