marketing and outsourcing

I love the term ‘outsourcing’. It means so many different things and so many different levels of responsibility for the company doing the outsourcing. However as a small business, there are some things you just can’t outsource and one of them is marketing.

While we were marketing by giving out samplers, leaflets and menus, our biggest problem was that the same people use the station everyday and we were marketing to the same people every day. When we went outside the station to do marketing, it sometime improved business, but there wasn’t a great impact. So when a woman from a marketing and PR company contacted me offering their services, it got me thinking. In fact Sahar Hashemi, who started Coffee Republic, mentioned that her business took off only after some great PR.

So she found our business online. The marketing company she was working for was quite new. The founder had experience from a large agency and started his own business and the woman had been working with him for a while and was tasked with finding new clients and managing the projects. So a young firm looking for clients. What they promised was PR, hands-on marketing, design work for leaflets, menus and more – this was perfect, exactly what I needed. Given that we are a new company, and so were they, I got them to agree to a deal where we paid them a low amount initially and then this stepped up once sales hit certain targets, proving that their marketing was working.

They loved the shop and the concept and had some great ideas about the way to market it. Some great initiatives instantly kicked off including loading up all the email addresses we had captured on the loyalty cards and doing a monthly themed email focusing on specific health-related issues and within that marketing some of our products. On some occasions we would also do a leafleted marketing campaign and offer some special offer to the customers that day on both forums, like buy one get one free, or free tea with porridge. These coordinated marketing efforts were quite successful, however after the initial lift in sales, they’d drop down again.

After a while we realised that, being at the height of the recession, people in that area just were not willing to part with much money on a regular basis and still saw what we did as a treat to have only once in a while. Whenever we did campaigns it bought people in, especially if there was special offers, but they were not going to become regulars.

At the same time, over the few months that we had the marketing company, I was constantly involved quite heavily in everything from design to coordinating the on-the-ground marketing, to rewriting the way they had written emails (even pulling out punctuation and grammatical errors). Even though I thought I had outsourced all that work, the fact was that I had to be constantly involved, and I often felt like a teacher correcting their work. Meenal often got involved with these tasks to fine-tune the marketing and even she commented that she thought what we were doing was what we were paying the marketing company to do!! It took up a lot of time. What I needed was someone on the ground who could coordinate them and the actual in-store marketing and everything else we needed on that front.

This is when Jonno introduced his girlfriend Paola. She was excellent – she was talkative, energetic, very enthusiastic about what we did, and she could be loud when promoting our products. She was also organised. This was perfect. I spent a lot of time on the marketing, and also a lot of time on basic admin like entering invoices onto a spreadsheet. She could help take over the administrative burden as well as help with on-the-ground marketing and liaise with our marketing and PR company. Perfect. I finally had time to focus on the broader aspects of the business and look at the other sources of income.