Melissa Brager of UWD Twin Cities talks about her experiences with advertising and never giving up.
by Melissa Brager, UWD Twin Cities
Steve opened his UWD dealership in March of 2009 and I have been with him from the start. At first I just pushed him to buy, then I started working part time, then full time and then we got married, had Tessie and said, “This is our life.” Our backgrounds are ditch-digging and corporate project work. I’ll let you guess who did what.
We aren’t afraid of hard work and we aren’t happy simply earning enough each month to pay the bills. We like money; we like it a lot. So spending it on advertising—investing in our business—is a scary thing for us. But we don’t throw money at every easy solution someone tries to sell us.
Marketing is a system. Everything you do works together. If you feed it with hard work and consistency, it will gain momentum. The more you feed your marketing system the more you will feel the traction. Impressions matter. People need to see you 20 times before you register in their brain. Once you are in their brain, it’s like you’ve always lived there.
We failed miserably at print in 2010 and 2011, with thousands invested and zero leads. I know that same campaign would work today because people see us—everywhere. I ask every single lead where they heard of us and the answers we get now are things we have never done. They mention their neighbor who worked for us years ago or that they used to live by our old warehouse in the ‘80s. I’m not kidding. They have no idea where they saw us, but they called.
Each call is the end result of every dollar we have spent over the last seven years on marketing. Our system has been fed—and it is working. Feed your marketing system. Continue to work hard. And, most of all, don’t give up. You’ll get there, just like we did.
