Help advertising t-shirt marketing

your return rate on direct mail is around 3%, if what i did 15 years ago or so still holds true. when you send that stuff out, you're not marketing, you're advertising. the idea of marketing is to find out who your customers are, *then* advertise to them as directly as possible.

when i did direct mail, i want to say a name cost like one and half cent or something like that. the more detailed that name's profile, increasing the likelihood of a sale, and the cost went up a couple of cents the more that person matched the product. now, seven cents doesn't sound like a lot, but multiply that by 10,000 and your costs are starting to get high. not sure if things still run like that, it's been a long time since i attempted it (and it didn't work, lol).

anyway, like i said, pick up a book on marketing and that's going to help out a lot, imo. chances are you don't know your market as well as you think, and if you don't begin to answer some real questions about your customers and designs, then you can wind up spinning your wheels wondering why you haven't made many sales. if you're handing out fliers and sending direct mail to random people, it will fail. you have to send them and hand them out to potential customers. i mean, you're wasting time and money handing out a flier to grandma if you're hawking affliction style gear, right? but, set up at an MMA show and you'll sell shirts and actually get a few ppl to visit your site.

what's your website?

andy, it sounds as if you're implying that social media is your key towards building a long-term brand while SEO is nothing more than grabbing a single sale and they'll never return. while facebook is certainly valuable, that in itself doesn't actually sell anything for you. i don't want people to come to my fb and hit 'like,' i need them to come to the actual site to buy something. a person can have 500 'likes' and not a single sale is generated. if i had 500 people that hit my site based on seo, which do you think i'm going to have better success with?

dunno. not having a site myself, if i had to choose between facebook/twitter/printerest/etc. and solid SEO, i think i'm going with the latter. of course, i'm not suggesting you ignore the social media, i merely question building a 'relationship' with someone through your social media that amounts to a business blog that is no guarantee of repeat business, which you're suggesting SEO fails to do (which, imo, is kind of a silly thing to suggest), versus driving people directly to your site that's more motivated to buy a specific product based on the keywords. i'd be interested in knowing the drop off rate between people who visit a facebook page and how many actually make it to the main site to buy something.

social media sites (i wont name them) offer the best solution for total integration and don't forget most of the sites are now mobile ,postal or tv are not and every body has a mobile these days,
So it gives you a web presence for no cost at all seeing as the big guys are free just make sure you have a very appealing page with tons of content which sounds a bit daunting but it isn't maybe a few days hard at it then just update when you have new goods or offers or get a website fanpage management team in who will do all the work for you .

Then if you want to get more custom use the sites paid advert programs which are good value in my eyes...

for instance a friend of mine who has had a tattoo parlour for the last 5 years & doing reasonably well ,then decided to open a website And also fanpage he created them a few months ago and once he had loaded all his photos of work up & done all the content adding created a paid advert which was then targeted at the customers he wanted to target and has added %30 extra sales from that avenue after just 3 months hes stopped his ads now and will probably put it back on when hes slow for work ....a nice tool to have in the box.