Week 9: The Month for Marketing
First of all I would like to get off my chest something in regards to week 3. Not sure if you remember I had a fall out with a significant person which over the weeks did impact my work. The lack of interaction with this person has somewhat impacted my state. In their absence I threw myself into work trying to bury my head in the paperwork. I vowed not to speak to that someone (for a few short weeks) but did however cave in as love is a much stronger emotion than hate. Needless to say I am not proud of my recent behaviour but some people have to understand they can only push so far. So here I am making a public apology to the greatest person on earth. I AM SORRY……!
With that being said I can now piece together the remnants of my dignity in order to push forward. Do not be fooled, if you think you will be able to set up a business without these mishaps. Like I said six weeks prior, you can’t avoid it but you can limit its severity.
My Target
I am going to try and fit in as much as I can but, the preparation of this (marketing) has started from at least a month ago. Diary keeping is harder than you might think as it's not a straightforward chronological process, rather ‘a dip in’ and ‘dip out’ of several intertwined areas. Firstly, you have to decide on your chosen market or desired clintle. Ours are ‘young professionals’ a typical sub-demographic of post uni to say mid 30s/ish. They are considered as young professionals who want to upgrade to a more fancy dwelling and leave their old student habitats behind. We provide their transition homes before they buy their 1st 3 bed semi with their respective partners somewhere in the suburbs. They have good jobs, a decent amount of cash and want a nice rental to show for. Now that we have decided upon the above we can swiftly move onto the next bit which is location.
Areas surrounding the centre or trendy/hipster provinces which are no more than half hours commute to the city. This helped me pinpoint my patch so I can start the process of building up my database. I deliberately chose to omit the city-centre as I was focusing on a slight niche market who both like the city but at the same time want a kind of community feel with parking thrown in. As you can appreciate, it is a nightmare to obtain the two. I then downloaded the register of HMO listings from the council website to contact my prospective Landlords but to my horror there were almost 2000 listings in Birmingham alone. After plenty of shifting and sorting the tedious task was complete. I chose a select couple of areas nearby the centre and the ones where the licences have just expired or about to come to an end. Sorting out this spreadsheet was a real killer but after a few cans of Red Bull, copious amounts of bombay mix and a couple of almost all nighters the job was complete. My revised spreadsheet consisted of 100 contacts. We are advised to keep the patch small so we can keep an eye on things and monitor their progress.
My Tools
Then came the decision of what medium to select, i.e letters, leaflets, or a combination of the two in the form of a newsletter? Well I chose a simple letter format direct to the landlords. Then comes the issue of what to write in there as you’ve never written one of these before. There is plenty circulating around the net but these are very basic so I took the liberty of writing my own content which was super catchy and different to what was being sent. You have to remember these landlords are getting 100s of these letters so yours has to stand out. Some great networking peers of mine suggested a company called Helloprint (yes on-line again). It cost me about £22 for 250 which was their minimum print. So what do I do with the rest? Duhhh, use it again for your next campaign. This was straight forward enough as we gave them the exact letter which they just printed out on some quality paper using our letterhead/logo. In just two days it arrived but guess what all the above was a doddle the real mayhem would you believe was the envelope? which I will tell you about next week.