Josh Cassel

I recently spent 7 days on vacation with my wife’s family on Lake Wallenpaupack over the Fourth of July weekend. It was a great week of relaxation, and of course fishing. Anyone who knows me well knows that I can’t go anywhere, especially to a lake, without going fishing. It just runs in my blood.

As I was out on the lake fishing from my kayak, enjoying the serenity of the morning and evening, I had a lot of time to clear my mind. I was able to recharge my batteries and collect my thoughts in preparation to return home and hit the ground running with some client attraction strategies.

What I came home with is a gameplan to start a “crusade” in the local business world. There are so many businesses right in my backyard that are paying out the nose for things like Yellow Page ads and various other dead end marketing “strategies”. Right off the top of my head, I can think of a handful of businesses that are spending unbelievable amounts of money each month on marketing that is really getting them nowhere. Take an ad in the local Yellow Pages for example. I mean really, how many people turn to the Yellow Pages anymore when they are looking for a product or service? Almost no one! Do you have any idea how much an ad in the phone book costs? You can easily put out a couple hundred a month for even a small ad. Furthermore, how can one know precisely how many customers they acquired from such an ad? And I’m only talking about the Yellow Pages. There are plenty of people out there charging up to $1000 per month to handle one aspect of a marketing campaign.

In my opinion, that is a bunch of crap.

I will be offering an all-inclusive online marketing campaign to businesses that will…encompass all areas of online marketing for equal to or less than what they are currently paying for one single service. Everything I do is measurable and I can show my clients exactly how many customers they are attracting based on the services that I perform. Instead of only handling one single aspect of online marketing, I will offer everything from web design to SEO to e-mail marketing to social media management to video marketing and more. Anything that can be done online to attract clients to a business is part of my offering. These businesses are already spending money on marketing like it is going out of style, why not get more value out of it?

Even though these are the same services I have already been doing for some of my clients, the difference in my mind now is my approach to offering these as monthly services and also my target market has changed a bit. I have gotten some really good feedback from some of my clients and other local businesses on this new approach and I’m excited to see how well it is received…especially by those who I will be saving from wasting their money on other dead-end marketing ploys.

Oh, I almost forgot to mention…I caught a nice bass on vacation too!