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MAKE NO MISTAKE: marketing is expensive. Marketing strategies and tools rarely offer guaranteed returns on investments, and the risks involved with large-scale campaigns are often too large for smaller companies to stomach. Nonetheless, there are ways to beat the system.
THE TAKE-AWAY
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Many older websites are falling off the radar of search engines these days. The reason this is happening is because major search engines have recently become quite fussy about the way websites are formatted and presented. They typically favour webpages that are designed in accordance to the latest W3C standards, which means using header tags, Cascading Style Sheets and no more tables. If your website is four years old or more, then chances are, it is still designed according to older standards and is thus no longer “search-engine friendly”
Getting a Web 2.0-compliant website does not have to be expensive. A domain name plus a webhosting solution costs less than RM200 per year. Tools like Wordpress are free, and are very user-friendly. They take all the heavy design work out of your hands, so that all you have to do is manage the content – writing, images, text. The result is a Web 2.0-compliant website that is easy to manage, virtually future-proof and very search engine-friendly.
With a little effort, you can redesign your own Web 2.0 website and have it launched for less than RM1,000, and in under one month. The result will be an almost immediate increase in the number of hits your website gets, and therefore, sales enquiries.
The Malaysian government frequently subsidizes SMI businesses when it goes on roadshows abroad to promote local enterprises. SMI businesses that want to partake in these roadshows can do so by getting properly accredited and certified by the government body that oversees its industry. For example: Biopro Sdn Bhd, a manufacturer and exporter of surgical grade rubber gloves, claims that almost all its marketing and promotions efforts are done by the Malaysian government.
“We have a very modest marketing budget, but we are certified with the Malaysian Rubber Export Promotion Council,” explains Mr Rajaretnam, General Manager of Biopro. “Whenever the council goes on roadshows to promote Malaysian rubber producers overseas, that generates some good leads for us.”
Lembaga Getah Malaysia also hosts exhibitions in Malaysia for rubber producers, and these exhibitions are attended by prospective customers from all over the world. Ordinarily, participating in such exhibitions would burn a serious hole in a company’s pockets. But since Biopro’s participation in these exhibitions is subsidized, the company runs a much lower risk of overspending.
“It is certainly an avenue to be considered to reduce marketing costs, especially for export based companies,” says Mr Rajaretnam.
One of the most expensive cost centers of marketing is in the design of professional marketing material and advertising collateral. If all you need is a new set of product brochures, for example, hiring a full-timer simply does not make economic sense. On the other hand, the costs of big-name ad agencies and public relations specialists are too prohibitive for most SMI businesses. So what can you do?
Thankfully, with the proliferation of home-based business and freelance professionals worldwide, finding alternatives to both options has become a matter of click, click, click. By using services like Elance.com, you can connect to freelance professionals worldwide, evaluate their portfolios, and get them to bid on your projects, often at a fraction of what a big-name agency or full-time professional would costs. You also get to see what their other customers have to say about them before deciding upon whether or not you want to hire them.
One of the major cost components in any direct sales business is travel. Travel affects both a company’s finances and the time its sales people spend on the field. But Manavalan & Associates has come up with a way to counter the adverse impact of travel – something Mr Vimal Manavalan calls “the Nest strategy”.
“The idea is to establish a target geographical area and to create a ‘nest’ within its vicinity,” explains Mr Manavalan. “You may only prospect at one big company, day after day. But you end up spending more quality time with customers instead of sitting in traffic jams. The result is that you get higher sales closing rates with fewer sales calls, and you also reduce your travel time and expense.”
