Top Tips For Your Marketing Campaigns
Here we are then, racing through 2008 and already we are six months in, scary isn’t it. What have you achieved so far this year? For us it has been all go go go, but hey, no propaganda is the mandate for our newsletter so let's leave the trumpet blowing to the blog and our press releases.
As a business we are heading towards the end of year two and the start of year three and I thought it would be a good time to report on what we consider to be the Top 5 Best Performing marketing campaigns that we have used to date.
I am keen to stress that these are just areas that have worked well for our service and not product driven business. I am sure we have covered off the marketing of product driven businesses in previous newsletters, but if not, then maybe it is an idea for next time.
So, here are the Top 5 most productive marketing activities we have experienced to date.#1 – Regular Press Releases
A large part of our business is public relations related and as such you would kind of expect us to keep sending regular messages to our target audience media.
As is always the case when it comes to PR, the ROI is more effective than any other of the marketing channels used, simply because if you do it in-house it virtually costs you nothing apart from your time.
The other upside to regularly sending out media messages is that as time goes by the press begin to see you as an expert in your field and you will start to be asked to comment on issues in your sector.
#2 – Keeping The Brand Fresh
Although 10 Yetis is nearing its second birthday as a limited company plenty of trial and testing went on for roughly 6 months to a year before we went Ltd to build and develop our branding.
Like many others our brand has evolved over time but what has been consistent throughout is that we have always had the wow factor. Every good marketing person will tell you that marketing materials have to be exciting and we view all of our stationary as marketing material and as such we try to sex them up as much as possible.
When we send one of our letterheads or compliment slips to people we nearly always get a “wow – that looks good” comment and this is where the power of having a strong and consistent brand message can pay dividends. Branding is possibly one of the most consistently overlooked yet vitally important marketing areas for SME’s.
#3 – Online/Offline Networking
Having now spent several years and far too much time hanging round online business forums it has become clear to me that offline networking is the ultimate continuation of the online networking phenomenon.
Online business forums are great for occasionally picking up clients, getting fast and efficient advice and testing the water for business ideas but once you have experienced the benefits of offline, face to face networking you will understand how important it is to your business.
Whoever said, “people win business” was very right. It is us as individuals who win new clients and businesses are often built on personalities. It is difficult to quickly get over your personality on an online forum whereas if you are at a networking event in 30-40 seconds you can communicate to an entire room exactly what type of person you are and hopefully convince them that your company is the one that they should be speaking to.
People who know me know how much I used to dread face to face networking events, not necessarily because of the elevator pitch (usually a minute where you stand up and give your sales blurb talk), but because I hated the fact I was going to get “sold to” by pushy people. I am over this now, but it takes time and occasionally I wake up on the morning of an event thinking, “here we go again”.
#4 – Constant Contact with Leads
Most accountants are wonderful at what they do but are not known for being beacons for positive thinking or marketing advice. Our accountant however, (Hi Alan) did come up with what we have found to be one of the most accurate sales statistics known; it takes on average 7 contacts with a prospective new client before you get the sale.
We have been long time believers in the need to “warm up” potential cold leads before going for the sales kill (gosh I sound aggressive) and we do this via quirky postcards to plant a positive message in the recipients sub conscious and then a steady flow of follow up material and calls.
It was only after speaking to Alan that I started looking in more depth at how many times we have had contact with a new client that I realised that is was around the 7 times number. I suppose there is two tips in this one, always keep in touch with leads and listen to what your accountant says.
#5 – If you are not confident doing it yourself get someone in!
This is one of the greatest marketing tips business owners can ever learn. We spend so much time running our businesses that we seldom have time or patience to learn new tricks. We quickly realised that when it comes to cold calling and telemarketing it is not our strongest skill and the best thing to do was to get someone in to do this for us.
Once you have realised you need help with something you need to move quickly to get someone on board who can help you out. For us it was a case of finding a telemarketing company we could trust and who would deliver the same kind of results based service we need.
This can be the same for designing sales and marketing literature, branding, public relations or just putting together a marketing plan, if you don’t feel you are doing it justice, don’t muddle through it, get someone in.
# Bonus Tip – Measure Everything for ROI
When I was starting out in my career I worked for a very talented boss who had been in the industry for decades. He taught me so much about business and industry at the highest level and for this I will always be grateful.
One of the key things he tried to instil in all his young charges and me was the term; “What gets measured gets done”. You know what, he was dead right.
Every marketing activity you carry out should be measured. You need to measure the cost of carrying a campaign out, the return it had both in leads and paying customers and the time it took for responses to come in.
If, like us, you try new marketing activities all the time, the need for measurement is vital as you can see which campaigns have worked the best, which can be tweaked for better ROI and which you should just ditch as they don’t deliver a good enough ROI.
With this it is important to realise that everything your business does can be classed as marketing activity, from the appearance of your invoices to the fact you network online and you need to try and measure against all this activity so you can consistently strive to improve your ROI.
So there we have this month’s newsletter, we hope you got something from reading it.
As you can imagine constantly coming up with new angles for newsletters is difficult and we welcome any suggestions for new topics. Don’t be afraid to get in touch. If you are wanting to learn more about a topic the chances are your fellow SME’s are as well.
Look forward to writing to you again next month and if you want to keep up with our day to day goings on, why subscribe to our blog?
Andy
An Addition From Real Oasis!
Richard Boyd, Managing Director at Real Oasis has added an enother excellent tip to the mix, "Look for areas that the competition is weak in and exploit to the max and if it's a trend can you buck the trend? Following trends are for weak companies, pro active companies set the trends."
Thanks Richard!