Marketing lesson: not all marketing is smart

The 5th of our blog competition guest posts - Ipshita Chatterjee of Minor Edition discusses some of her previous marketing joys and losses. The original guidelines for entry are here, read all the featured entries, you could also read about how we chose the winner, or what we learned from running the blogging competition. A marketing lesson? As I was tweeting my blog link about my tips on setting up a market stall for the very first time, Bronwyn Durand suggested I write about the single most important marketing lesson.. so far Uh hmm.., I thought.. easy peasy. So, as I set about writing this blog post, it might end up as an incoherent blur. Now! A little bit about me I design absolutely gorgeous dresses for little ones and they are manufactured ethically in very limited editions. Once my daughter Mini road tests and approves all the dresses, I set about selling them. I run all aspects of my business single-handedly and hubby, the accountant, assists me on keeping the books in order. I have just completed one year of becoming a small business owner, but Marketing? Did I do it at all? Not a great deal I thought. I did jump at the usual marketing bandwagon in the first quarter of my year. image source - internet What did I do? Printed flyers and postcards and distributed in every possible corner, where I thought my target customer is. There were hardly any sales! Advertised in baby shows and magazines that my target customers read and had good readership. It was not worth it. Do you know what was the worse thing that I did? Organise a Facebook giveaway. It was beyond belief. All along, I continued to contact my target customer through Facebook, Twitter, through word of mouth and showcased my dresses by meeting people, my friends and also at market stalls. So what lesson did I learn? Not all marketing is smart marketing With no budget for marketing (or for anything else at all), I finally did manage to get sales and would you believe it? A lot of people visit my website daily. (Not obsessed with the latter obviously because I am interested in the actual number of sales). Direct interaction with potential customers, reviewers, bloggers and meeting customers first hand, helped me sell in the first year. I therefore do have mixed feelings about my marketing strategy (was there any?) for the first year. A little bit about tomorrow. What do I want to do? I want to - Concentrate on strengthening to build relationships - Improve my art of telling a story about my hopes and ambitions. - Develop a brand. - Visualise my dream of establishing a higher purpose of the brand by giving back to the community. Read Minor Edition's original blog post here Any thoughts? What is your top marketing lesson ? To remind you once again, I design gorgeous dresses for little girls (2-6 yrs) and sell online to their savvy mums worldwide. P.S. You can catch me on twitter @minor_edition Read the original Minor Edition blog post here. What do you think? What kind of marketing choices have you made and learnt from? Bronwyn Durand founded JupiterJasper, the Marketing Mentor for small businesses. Bronwyn is also The Brand Whisperer, with a special interest in building commercial identities for businesses. Do you get my free weekly email? Sign up to ’1 Thing to Improve Your Marketing this week’ here.