Weekly Success Tip

Mining Gold from Your Business with Theme-Based Marketing

As small business owners, our #1 highest priority and function is that of sales and marketing. We should always be looking for an angle or reason to promote our products and services to both new and existing clients. One of the easiest forms of marketing is what I call Theme-based Marketing.

Before I explain Theme-based Marketing, let me first give you an example.

Over the Australia Day weekend I received a promotional email from one of Australia’s largest domain name registrants, SmartyHost, promoting their Australia Day weekend sale. SmartyHost was offering 20% off all products, including domain names, for 72 hours only.

I took the opportunity to register a ‘.com.au’ domain that I hadn’t got around to doing previously, and this promotion reminded me to do it. This is an example of Theme-based Marketing and by doing it, SmartyHost picked up an easy sale. All they had to do was make an offer. Pretty easy really.

I used to do this a lot when I had my fitness club. We had a 12 month schedule of marketing, revolving around major themes. Here’s a list of some of the themes we included:

• New Year
• Back to school
• Valentine's Day
• Annual Birthdays
• Australia Day
• Easter
• Summer, Autumn, Winter, Spring
• Mother's Day
• Father's Day
• Queen's Birthday
• Opening, Closing
• Halloween – (true that us Aussies don’t celebrate it much, but hey, in this economy any excuse to increase sales!)
• Christmas
• Holiday Seasons

You can develop any or all of these into a major marketing effort that you run each year. The beauty of it is that once you’ve done it the first time, it’s easy to roll out again, year after year. Obviously you need to come up with a related offer and always, always, test and measure your results, so you can improve upon it next time.

If you work for someone else, print this email out, discuss it with your boss and suggest some creative promotions. Your boss will love you for it.

ACTION STEP:

Sit down and draw up a 12 month calendar of marketing ideas and promotions you can run around themes. Then create an offer and start planning your next promotion.