Marketing Concept: Don’t Rent Your Marketing, OWN IT! (Part 1)

If you’ve ever bought property or studied the real estate market, you may have concluded that it oftentimes pays more dividends and makes more long-term sense to own property vs. renting it.

Taking that concept and applying it to your marketing and advertising budget can pay off greatly because the same concept holds true: Having ownership of your advertising dollar allows your business to grow over time and you to yield returns throughout your lifetime—even long after you’ve stopped paying for services.

Think of this example: Spending money on temporary ads in media like the yellow pages, billboards or newspapers could easily rack up a several thousand-dollar bill over just a few months of run-time.  That money is gone as soon as you spend it and your returns vanish immediately after the ads expire—and who knows if the ads will even yield you any real returns at all?

Consider this kind of advertising “rent marketing.”  Just like an apartment’s benefits would cease immediately after you stopped paying rent (because you’d probably get kicked out), so too do your marketing returns end as soon as you stop paying for run time, because your ads essentially get evicted from their media as well.

So what’s an example of “own marketing” that may yield better results? Say you decide that same money should be spent on a search engine optimized website for your company.  Instead of expiring, this investment grows long after your site is finished and paid for—and you own it—you can make additions or evolve it however you like over time.  Regardless of what you do, barring an online catastrophe, your site’s page rank will climb and yield you more online business the longer it’s around.

If a time comes when you no longer want to funnel money into marketing campaigns—say you decide to use your budget on equipment upkeep, or need a new facility, or you fall on hard times and need to cut budget costs—you still own the site you invested in and it’s marketing powers will continue to snowball as long as the site’s around.

The same concepts can be applied to marketing campaigns such as e-mail marketing or targeted direct mailers.

Direct mail and email marketing can easily fall into the “rent marketing” concept—maybe you purchase an email list of possible hot customers and send out a blast.  The returns you yield end shortly after the initial blast.  Conceptually, a direct mailer is also a rentable marketing commodity.  Once you stop paying for it, you stop reaping results.

So how can email marketing be transformed to more of an “own marketing” concept?

Imagine your Internet marketing company provides you with an email marketing service. The addresses they gather and remove throughout the years based on relevancy result in a customer base that is current, full of real interested customers, and becomes yours to own—even if you stop paying the Internet marketing company for their services. You can initiate your own promotions and campaigns with the same mailing list however you like. You can follow up with your best customers or simply notify them when new products or services develop.

Sure you could continually “rent” email lists from companies that sell them, but you’re opening the doors for SPAM flags and ineffective email marketing because they aren’t nurtured, personalized lists.  They have much less benefit than cultivating your own relevant customer base and will cost you much more long-term.

So when you’re deciding what online marketing services or traditional advertising methods will work best for you and your business, think in terms of rent vs. own.  The more balance you have on the ownership side of the equation, the more equity your business and marketing dollar can yield.
Part 2 coming next week.

To find out more about your future marketing ownership, or to have Trimark Marketing Group design a marketing campaign that will yield real results call us at 800-420-4254.