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Marketing a Barrels and Drums Business

Small and medium size barrel and drum businesses can compete and even outperform larger competitors. All it takes is the right marketing plan.

Marketing is the bridge between an organization and its customer base. Build your bridge poorly and you'll quickly find your barrel and drum business cut off from the marketplace.

For industry insiders, it's becoming apparent that marketing ability is just as important as the quality of the deliverables you produce. On the upside, great marketing is a real possibility for a barrel and drum business with a strong value proposition and a desire to achieve a visible market presence.

Customer Awareness

Top barrel and drum businesses go out of their way to maintain clear channels of communication with their customers. In this market sector, managers and promoters need to be extremely familiar with their customers' needs and purchasing preferences. Businesses that market blindly fail to achieve acceptable ROI for their efforts. By improving market awareness, small companies can often establish more meaningful customer connections than their competitors.

Marketing Collateral

Brochures, business cards, folders, direct mail pieces, and other types of promotional materials are called marketing collateral. For barrel and drum businesses, it's important to make sure every piece of marketing collateral generate reinforces your brand and value proposition. To squeeze the most impact from your collateral, it needs to be targeted toward its recipients. Delivered to the wrong person, a valuable piece of collateral will collect dust. Collateral distributed through direct mail channels realizes its highest return when it is paired with an updated mailing list from a top mailing list vendor. It doesn't make sense to invest time and creativity in marketing collateral only to drop the ball on distribution. Without proper attention to distribution details, your barrel and drum business's investment in collateral will be pointless.

Social Media Monitoring

The use of social media as a marketing tool is the latest wave to overtake the small business community. Combined with a functional company website, social media attracts new customers and converts them to brand advocates. Social media can quickly go negative, turning brand advocacy into "badvocacy", a scenario in which consumers and users create content deriding your company and your products. All barrel and drum businesses need to be particularly sensitive about the potential for negative brand commentary on social media sites. Social media monitoring can be as simple as periodical Google searches or as complex as the application of sophisticated monitoring software. Either way, it's essential to develop a system for regularly monitoring your company's presence in social media, followed by positive customer engagements.

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