Smart Marketing in a Rural Setting Can Double Sales

Suzanne at Grace Publishing, an online and print magazine company, likes to say there are three keys to creating unstoppable momentum for your business:

- Clarity
- Congruency
- Consistency

Clarity means discovering what you are designed to do. We can help
you do that by identifying your greatest strengths and advantages.

Clarity gives you realistic expectations for business, which are often much higher than you presently expect. For example, a Jeep and an Indy racer are both cars, but
designed to do very different things. You wouldn't expect a Jeep to be
competitive in the Indianapolis 500. Nor would you expect the Indy racer
to negotiate a logging trail. They are designed for different purposes.
So too it is with businesses. Clarity allows you to have realistic expectations
of what you can and can not do. This is the same concept that drives advertising. You wouldn’t expect a coupon clipper, or local newspaper ad, to build your business’s image, and attract people who are not looking for bargains. Nor would you expect a newspaper to have the ability to reach the number of people that an online ezine has the ability to attract.

CeramicFreinds in Gorrie took advantage of our expertise and allowed us to put their business on the web. Before her web site was even published, two months ago, as an they had more than 300 hits and 3 contacts for wholesale sales. They had the product. They had the supply. They just didn’t realize their potential.

It's one thing to know what you are designed to do. It's another to do it.
The only thing that stops people from pursuing their full potential is lack of knowledge:.

FACT:

• 60% of all people who are linked to the Internet buy from the Internet
• Almost 100% of all educated, established professionals and business people, (with disposable income) consider a computer as a necessity – even those who do not own a television.
• The shopping trend of people using the net to shop and compare products is doubling every few months.
• Online regional magazines like www.shop-huron.com have already proven they are powerful advertising tools for small businesses with low advertising budgets.

The simplistic definition of congruency; How things relate to each other, interact to each other, and are dependent on each other. When it comes to congruency, you may need to make some adjustments. Most will be incremental, but some may be radical, such as changing the way you advertise and the type of people (demographic) your advertising targets. The goal is to spend more time and money attracting the right type of customers. Many small business owners are caught up in the numbers of people who will see an ad, not whether those people are actually shopping for their product, can afford their product, or are even shoppers at the moment they see the ad. Maximizing the number of shoppers who have money that see your ad, and minimizing the cost of attracting those people is where performance and satisfaction both peak. This is the secret of magazine and ezine advertising – the customer asks for the magazine or ezine, eliminating the ‘intrusive factor’ in the publication’s advertising. Or, to put it in publisher terms; The ads become the content of the publication, not an add on.

Consistency means staying with it. Have you ever been caught in traffic in a
large city? You accelerate as the light turns green, only to stop at the red
light on the next corner. This pattern of starting and stopping repeats itself
over and over as you make your way to your destination. It's impossible to
gain any momentum, which results in both lost sales, and higher expenses. The problem most small business owners have falls in their choice of advertising. Many small business owners choose their advertising based on three beliefs:

• It worked for my competition so it will work for me.
• It has worked this way for years.
• The most expensive method works the best.

This combination can be deadly for a business’s long term growth. The problem with this type of limited thinking is that it binds the business owner’s creativity, rendering them unable to look toward future shopping trends in the local economy.

Businesses have momentum which is achieved by practicing Clarity and Congruency over a long period of time.

Smart choices enable a business to grow.
Having a definite plan will help you pick the best choice for YOUR business.
Focus will enable you to explore different methods of marketing.

This is why we created www.shop-huron.com

Grace Publishing is a magazine publisher. As such, we keep a sharp eye on mundane topics like buyer’s trends. One thing we see in this area is a very sharply changing, and quickly growing, consumer base. As wealthy people move out of the city, small family farms are growing into large ventures, and as the population grows, we are noticing a sharp increase in the number of sales local businesses are attracting. Combine this with the fact that gas prices are expected to double, and the statistics we are collecting prove that the trend to ‘shop in the city’ will quickly give way to shopping locally – if the businesses have the product.

Unfortunately, it is hard to reach the educated professional families. They do not use coupon clippers, hate junk mail, and rarely listen to local radio unless they are in the car, preferring to have their favourite music streamlined through their computers.

What have we learned as a magazine publishing company?

• Regional magazine advertising is 60% more effective than radio when it comes to building image and for consumer retention.
• Shoppers frequent stores that support their local magazines and online ezines because they see the advertiser as a concerned business who is giving something back to the community.
• Online advertising is effective because shoppers know where to look for the product when THEY are ready to buy. Unlike other types of advertising mediums that only put your business in the consumer’s eye when you have the money to advertise.
• Ezine advertising can have the same image building advantages as magazine advertising at a tenth of the cost.