Marketing, marketing and more marketing

     When I opened my new music store I knew there would be a need for marketing.  Target markets do change and there is a continual need to keep focusing your marketing efforts to hit that bulls eye that keeps changing.  With the tuning enterprise the market suddenly changed shen the US economy tanked relatively recently.  Previously if you wanted to increase your customer base the fastest way to accomplish that was to do warranty tuning for stores selling new pianos.  The deal alsays was that you did these tunings cheap but after that initial tuning the customer was yours.  When all the new piano makers went out of business except Steinway that market suddenly disapeared.
     An unexpected benefit of that for me was that there were experienced tuners willing to accept work from Renshaw Music that were too busy with their own customers before.  Finding new customers in the tuning business suddenly repuired marketing efforts.  With the store I have had to be a relentless marketer to build the customer base for this new enterprise. 
     My recent ribbon cutting was a big boost to the traffic in the store but as the season is starting I now need to compete with many other voices that are trying to tap into those new dollars.  My store is not a specialty shop so I am waging a marketing battle on many fronts.  I find that i need to think outside the box with products that would be considered gift items with a musical theme.  With the Christmas season coming as well as the snow birds returning there is a significant opportunity here but it is going to repuire both a relentless and shameless marketing effort on my part. 
     The series of guirilla marketing books that I have written about in previous posts identify 200 marketing weapons and suggest that one designes a marketing plan and then evaluates the effectiveness of each of these tools that are in use and then ditch the ones that are not working, increase efforts into the one's that are working, and add new weapons that you think might work.  That is the spirit of  the relentless and shameless marketing  that I find I need to throw myself into.