Making your marketing count
January 30, 2009
At a time when it is more important than ever to ensure your marketing is earning its keep, here are Bluestorm’s recommendations for healthy marketing, whatever the spend.
It’s important to view marketing in support of your sales activity, and also your customer service. We won’t tell you that marketing is an absolute solution for creating sales leads, but it can perform a crucial role in the process if planned and executed expertly.
Perhaps the cheapest and most effective marketing tools available to you are your existing customers. They can help spread the word about the service they received; good or bad. If you’re happy that customers are leaving your premises as positive walking billboards, the next step is to follow this up with some profile raising activities… here are a few that we consider to be both cost effective and wide reaching.
Website
Increasingly, potential customers will make Google their first port of call before calling or visiting your company. Follow these five simple steps to make the most of your web presence:
- Keep presentation of a high standard, in-keeping with all other corporate material; treat any re-branding separately – your website is not the place to try out a new colour scheme because you think it looks nice!
- Make your website navigation user friendly; not everyone likes to feel like a hacker when trying to find your contact numbers!
- Keep information current and easily available to viewers; search engines like new content, and it’ll help to establish your site as a useful resource to existing and potential customers.
- Include a sign up section for an e-newsletter or a feedback form to encourage two-way communication through the site; you never know when your marketing agency might chase you for data!
- Don’t try and be more complicated than you need; a simple concise website will be more effective than a site full of animation and arty touches that is difficult to navigate and isn’t regularly updated.
Remember – your website doesn’t have to be expensive to be effective.
E-Marketing
While we’re on the subject of online marketing, it’s worth mentioning e-newsletters. Regular email communication keeps you in touch with your existing and potential customers, encourages a two-way communication process, and is cheaper than petrol or motorway mileage!
Like your website, e-marketing transmissions should be well presented and in-keeping with your corporate identity. Including useful industry news updates will maintain interest and set you up as a useful source of information, giving you credibility.
E-marketing should be carefully planned. Don’t flood your email database with irrelevant or sales heavy newsletters. This will turn off recipients and you’ll quickly find yourself added to the list of junk email senders!
Public Relations
Once you’ve got everything else in place, you’ll want to raise your profile. If your competitors are cutting their marketing budgets, determined to keep that football sponsor advert in the MD’s favourite matchday programme, now could be your opportunity to increase market share and keep your company in the public eye.
PR works through 3rd party endorsement to increase your chances of conveying key messages to the right people. Editorial coverage obtained through PR has been valued at three times that of equivalent advertising space by the Chartered Institute of PR – now that’s a bargain!
Public relations activity can be scaled up or down, while the focus and target sectors can be easily changed, giving you control over what is being said about your company, and when.
A well planned PR undercurrent in support of the above activities and in addition to you doing what you do best, will help to keep your name out there and give existing customers confidence in dealing with you. In addition, your sales team will have an easier job calling people who have heard about your services and achievements associated with a particular sector than they would have going in cold!
It’s important to ensure that, no matter how active or direct your marketing activities, they are always carefully planned with quality and consistency of your key messages in mind. Make use of resources which are already at your disposal. When you know how much you want to spend and what you want that budget to achieve, speak to one of our consultants for more details of results driven marketing solutions and make your marketing work for you in 2009.
