Waste not, want not

Glamazon Shoes has been in business for 6 months now, and to say it’s been a steep learning curve is a massive understatement. There have been some fantastic lessons learnt along the way. Then there have also been some quite painful and expensive ones. No matter what your experience, it’s fair to say that there is an element of trial and error with anything new, particularly in the area of marketing. It’s not as simple as just placing an ad in the paper or sitting back and waiting for word of mouth to kick in. These days marketing strategies and tactics can be quite complex and entail a lot of different activities. Print advertising, radio, TV (if the budget allows), leaflet drops and of course, social media, which is a world in itself. It can be difficult to know where to spend the money, particularly with a limited budget as a startup. That’s where the trial and error part comes in. You spend the dollars in a particular medium and then review how effective it was and how much ‘bang for your buck’ the business received. Obviously the ideal is spending as little as possible and getting a heap of publicity in return. Glamazon has already seen both sides of that particular coin. A big win for us back in June was a free plug – with photo – in one of Melbourne’s biggest newspapers, the Sunday Herald-Sun. The response was phenomenal and sales skyrocketed in the weeks afterwards before coming back to earth. Then there was our very unfortunate experience with a boutique PR agency. They were great on the sales pitch and in taking a 5 figure sum for their ‘work’ but only managed to deliver a brief write-up in an online shopping directory. That particular experience certainly hurt, but has it turned me off PR? Not in the least. I still firmly believe that deployment of a good PR strategy by someone that knows what they’re doing, can be incredible in kick-starting a business. How to pick the right one….. well, that’s the million dollar question. Hopefully it doesn’t end up costing as much.