What Was Your Best Marketing Success?

It has been a while since anyone posted a comment, but here goes:

I'm in the graphic design business, specialising in print (I'm from Ireland so I haven't spelt specialising incorrectly - you have a keen eye though).

Whenever I see a poorly designed print ad I'll cut it out and store it for any quiet spells I might have in future. If those spells come around, which I keep saying will but haven't in some time, I'll pull out that crap ad, redesign it, apply a little copyright mention and send it to the company who are advertising themselves.

I'll let them know that they could be portraying their business in a much better light than they currently are, showing them exactly how and inviting them to contact me (of course I'd follow the mailer up a few days later with a phone call but this hasn't been needed so far).

Just a little tip from the front end.

I'm sure you've all heard of this before but you can advertise things in your e-mail footers/signatures or forum signatures or even blog replies (those that allow a website listing). Yaro's suggestion of posting on campus bulletin boards are also really good.

It, however, also depends on your goal or purpose. If you are a local business and are providing a service to town customers it may not be in your best interest to try and go "all out" online. Different marketing methods may be your tactic -- ie. park benches, car stickers/magnets, bus benches.

As Jason said, having a targeted list of e-mails is undeniably crucial -- "pure gold."

The means listed above for generating traffic are all good but it doesn't hurt to be creative and repetitive.

Well, I can not give out specifics, but my best marketing technique is all online based. I have spent over 10 years in web development, and focused heavily on Internet marketing along with my PHP and XHTML development.

By far, from all the metrics I have done over the past 10 years.. SEO and email marketing have out performed any offline or other online marketing I have done.. and since I have worked with companies that have had great products and service, the word of mouth advertising works well too.

Building up a list of targetted email address of your clients and sending them updates when you have them on your products/services, is like pure gold.

You have to get those clients first, and thats where SEO really shined for me. I can't give away my secrets here, but really focusing on SEO and not paid placements, really gets you the traffic you need for those email lists.

Those clients are really pleased with the service and products they get, and they spread our name by word of mouth, which gets people to our site, which also gets them in our email lists.

I found that search engine optimization was the most beneficial marketing activity for our organization. The results were profound...before the project we were gaining roughly 30% of our leads via our website. After the project we were gaining over 60% of our leads from our website.

In addition, the leads coming in were of greater quality since we rank well in Google for many relevant keywords.

Thai
www.stage-gate.com

I don't know if I can call it a technique, but I have had moderate success of promoting new projects leveraging my main sites. The new projects are related back to my main site, so I am at least increasing value to my customers.

The sites then get listed in Google, and then I can get search traffic. I also expirement with PPC, but why pay for traffic when you get it for free!

Hey Ryan - thanks for your comments. Unfortunately it appears either the readers of this blog haven't had much success marketing, they are too shy/smart to share their marketing secrets or, sadly, no one reads this blog :-(

I can share my biggest marketing success in terms of ROI - it is still paper posters on bulletin boards at universities - as a long term strategy anyway. I think online pay per click advertising may surpass my success with posters but it's hard to compare the two mediums since I haven't exactly kept very good stats on my postering efforts.

Great post, I just started a business, oilexpressions.com, and I am having some trouble with marketing our product. One of the roads we have taken is search engine optimization which by simply reading blogs and posting comments with your website attached can gain you unique hits to your site and generate traffic. Being on top of the internet game and search engines is on the top of the list for us, any suggestions would also be greatly appreciated since im new to the marketing game.