Auckland Marketing and Promotions Business Diary July 09

Good chance for me to get back on this blog with some original content and go over some of my latest business ideas.

Last I left off I had Identified 3 areas for development - video marketing, auckland colour printing services, and my pirate birthday party entertainer service.

Since then I’ve been quite fortunate in getting access to staff members who can carry out video tasks so that’s REALLY moved to the fore especially since a lot of the same services that were similar that I was looking at providing seemed a lot lower value.

Particularly the graphic design service - there was no way we could provide a competitive service charging for jobs worth less than $200 because of all the customer service hassles it entails. You need to focus on business that is either going to produce high value returns or produce high sales and turnover but with limited commitment on the part of the entrepreneur.

This involves a cluster of services - graphic design and colour copying together with local poster distribution services - which makes you think it puts you in a good position to sell multiple services and to access larger parts of the market but if the margins are small, you know you’re going to be pushing uphill whether you’re making sales or not.

So I did move to focusing more on video because there is a large number of services that can be provided:

Cheap Video Production: producing short online video presentations for use on websites

Cheap Video Editing: Making video editing staff available at budget prices but still with a premium for me and my assurance of quality

Cheap Video Marketing:  is where we’ve been already m=working porincipally marketing videos online on youtube

So you’ve got a bunch of niches within a niche supporting each other and becoming a platform for the old cross sell, upsell etc.

But the pirate business has also made a come back. I guess the pirate birthday entertainer thing isn’t the most efficient business model but it’s got aspects to it also that are compelling.

Firstly the demand is there for something unique.  And secondly I can meet this demand with very little resources other than the fact that it is quite personally demanding having to entertain kids for an hour!

But the fact that it’s unique, that the demand is there and that I can provide the service easily without expense means it’s a very safe business model, it’s just not scaleable and of course it is quite disruptive to my lifestyle having to be prepared professionally on a saturday or sunday morning for a kids birthday party!

What about copying? Well the Auckland copying site is up. The problem with Auckland Copying of course is again the low margins. I mean when you compare a pirate job to a print job then just running some prints is a lot easier, except most of the jobs have margins of only $50-100, so really I need to be doing this at least half a dozen times each week to make it viable. It’s similar to pirates and less similar to graphic design jobs because the demand exists for cheap printing but the market isn’t saturated with options to the point I can’t compete with my  marketing skills.

And of course the issue with providing online services is the amount of maintenance and customer service required. When the service involves you being physically present or a physical product it’s going to allow for the product or service itself to be judged whereas online services require a lot more effort at the sales level and consultation.

So what’s the new plan? All the new ideas are still holding up strong to the point where other ideas trailing those top three will have to take a step back - which is principally graphic design, gig promotion, and blog promotion.

These are businesses I’ll be delegating to someone below me without to much concern for how effective they are for the time being.

Should I sell them? Maybe but I’m happy to let them sit for now - I need to improve the websites for my video and copying sites, as well as the ad campaigns accompanying them and then finally the system by which clients are consulted to be provided for in the best possible manner.

Again the pirate entertainment doesn’t require this as demand is so high, it converts despite the page being not particularly attractive or the marketing being that strong.