Pay as you go

By Kim Browne

We’ve been on a two-month sabbatical from writing and compiling our TOAST newsletter. It certainly wasn’t intentional and would be suicidal in the professional publishing space, where I learnt almost everything I know business-wise, before successfully launching Twisted Toast. It is what it is and we have lots of reasons why we haven’t got to our own newsletter lately. Frankly, if I had tried to use any of them as excuses back when I was a publisher, none of them would have held any water with me. So I won’t try excuse it and would prefer to just move along swiftly…

It is heartening to know that our newsletter was missed by a number of our clients. Which proves my long-held point of view that professional email newsletters are fantastic communications tools that should not be overlooked. Getting them out regularly and on time is an art that should be respected, along with other marketing communication. Sometimes, we are so busy with our clients’ communication, we forget about our own. As our clients pay us to do their newsletters, they take preference. Simple as that.

Professional marketing services undertaken by experienced marketing experts work. If they didn’t, companies such as ours would simply not exist. There’s a difference to getting skilled marketing experts to execute a campaign, compared to some fly-by-night, cheap and inexperienced “guru”. It also costs more. But as always, you get what you pay for.

In my experience, cheap and fast seldom have a happy ending. All skills are also not the same. A team of experts with core complementary competencies is where the magic happens. Relevant knowledge (knowing what to do), skill (knowing how to do it) and experience (having done it before) are true differentiating considerations.

In tough economic times as we are currently experiencing, people often underestimate the value of marketing. But this is a critical time to continue marketing efforts to really pull ahead of competition. And there is always competition.

Twisted Toast is now well into our sixth year – the same amount of time it takes to study to be a medical doctor. We’ve come a long way. Recently, I was reminded just how much we’ve learnt in this time.

We have no intention of stopping now. Being blessed with more clients than we can get to in a day, we’d obviously be insane to give our skill sets away for free. But people can be strange when it comes to money…

Simply put, we love what we do, but we do need to charge, or we’d need other day jobs. If you don’t have budget, don’t waste your time or ours – we aren’t the agency for you. We aren’t young, inexperienced jocks, trying to make a name for ourselves by giving away expertise for free. We’ve been there, done that and got the T-shirt a few times over.

Thank you to our many loyal, paying contract clients for sticking with us. As real partners we can create great marketing together… with a twist! It’s magic :)