5 Growth Success Factors Your Business Must Have To Make More Money
Feature article in MyBusiness magazine
31st January 2003
Marketing 101 for the Business Owner – 101 Marketing Tips
As a business owner, you need practical tips for marketing your products and services. You don’t want theory, you want results
There is a vast range of marketing activities which could be combined to successfully launch your products into the market, build your client base, raise your company’s profile, promote a special offer, or just consistently build your business. With the right marketing mix you will positively impact the top and bottom lines of your business, but the right approach to take can be very daunting if you’re not a marketing expert.
The following checklist of 101 marketing tips covers most aspects of marketing, and has been designed to provide you with some basic guidelines on what marketing is all about and how to use the tools:
1) DO a marketing plan!
2) Define your goals
3) Make your strategic goals measurable
4) DO develop and assess strategies and goals on an annual basis, and track performance regularly.
Market Research
5) There are two broad types of market research you could use:
i. Qualitative, where you measure the opinions and attitudes of your target market.
ii. Quantitative, where you measure statistics (for example, 87% of customers believe that the service they receive from your business is superior)
6) Use an external specialist for your market research.
7) Many large-scale research projects involve a combination of focus group testing, face-to-face interviews, telephone interviews, and sometimes the use of customer-completed surveys. This produces a mix of qualitative (opinion) and quantitative (quantity) results. Both are important.
Processes
8) Effective internal processes ensure smooth delivery and subsequent servicing to the customer. If you can’t deliver your products on time, in the configuration or amount specified by your customer, in full and at the agreed price, then your customers won’t be back for more in the future.
9) DO put yourself in the customer’s position. Processes can make the customer experience positive or negative.
10) Before you launch a new product, run through the end-to-end process from enquiry to sales visit to purchasing to follow through, and make sure you have everything covered off.
Product or service
11) DO understand exactly what you are selling, and which segments of the market want it. Is it profitable?
12) Are you selling enough products, or too many, and do you have the right mix?
13) Don’t become emotionally attached to your products or services. When it’s time to change, replace, enhance, develop new products, do it!
14) If you distribute someone else’s brand, or you are building your own, remember that when you market a brand you are also marketing values.
15) Every business needs a cash cow, whether it’s a product or service.
Price
16) All aspects of the product need to be priced (for example, is there a price for optional extras, installation, consulting services, help desk advice, training etc.)
17) Can you price to market and still make a bottom up cost recovery with acceptable margins.
18) Some typical pricing strategies include:
i. Breakeven pricing
ii. Cost plus pricing
iii. Demand based pricing
19) Determining a sound pricing strategy requires a thorough understanding of the competitive environment and robust forecasting of likely customer demand.
20) Someone can always undercut you, so engage in price discounting with extreme caution.
Promotion (General)
21) There are many different ways to reach your target market and promote your product or service. Consideration must be given to your budget, your sales objectives, and knowing who and where your target market is and what their purchasing drivers are.
22) Advertising generally falls into these categories:
i. Print (newspapers, magazines)
ii. Television commercials (TVC)
iii. Outdoor (billboards/buses etc.)
iv. Radio
23) Calculate the cost of your advertising against the expected returns.
24) Think about why you are advertising and what you aim to achieve, before you go ahead and do it.
Conferences and Exhibitions
25) Never participate in a trade show without clear objectives in mind.
26) Remember to collect leads
Sponsorship
27) Sponsorship is usually considered to be associated with major events, and equally large marketing budgets. Not necessarily. Companies wishing to have direct access to their target market could sponsor small and specific events.
28) Sponsorship must be like any other marketing activity – it needs to be backed up and supported by other marketing activities in order to have maximum effect.
29) Align your company’s values with those of the event you wish to sponsor.
30) Choose your sponsorship targets like you would your target customers – they should be closely aligned.
Direct Marketing
31) Australia Post recently published a survey on direct marketing in Australia, and found that 25% of all direct marketing to consumers is not even opened, and thrown away.
32) Direct marketing, it would appear, can be a hit and miss affair. That’s the bad news.
33) Do your research so you hit the right targets with the right message.
34) Well-executed DM can produce very successful results. That’s the good news.
35) Mass-distributed direct marketing, with little research behind it, can produce results of maybe a 1% hit rate. Well-researched and executed DM can produce much higher double-digit results.
36) Direct marketing is the method, but the content is all-important. It must be persuasive in order to achieve successful results.
37) It is easy to measure the value of your direct marketing campaign, as the costs are easy to calculate, and the results are equally easy to collate if measurement methods are in place.
38) Make sure your database is up to date and accurate.
39) Personalise any direct mail if you can.
40) Don’t make assumptions – not all women are ‘Mrs’ and not all names like ‘Chris’ belong to males.
41) Provide easy-to-respond-to offers.
Loyalty Programs
42) Loyalty programs are aimed at rewarding and retaining existing (loyal) customers, as well as engendering loyalty from customers.
43) Airlines are a good example of loyalty programs, but opinion varies on how well they are executed. Many people were ‘burned’ by loyalty programs after the collapse of Ansett, and the collapse of their frequent flyer points along with it. When consumers redeem loyalty points, they are also ‘free’ to join with a competitor’s program and start again from scratch.
44) In the rush to acquire new customers with special offers, don’t forget something for your existing (loyal) customers.
45) Customers are loyal when their experience with a company is good, memorable, and on some emotional level.
46) Rewarding loyalty with price discounting may work in some cases, but it is advisable to find other ways to reward and retain loyalty.
Point of Sale and Merchandising
47) Effective point of sale solutions can increase sales.
48) Companies involved in consumer marketing rely heavily on point of sale displays and merchandising.
Internet Marketing
49) Before you do anything, develop a strategy. You may approach the use of your website in several stages:
i. Stage 1 is to develop a point of presence site
ii. Stage 2 could be to update the site to enable some interaction with your visitors
iii. Stage 3 may be an early stage of e-commerce.
50) Choose a web developer who could potentially deliver all of the above stages for you.
51) When designing your website, DO make it consistent in look and feel to the rest of your marketing materials.
52) DON’T fill it with clever animations and graphics – it makes the site slower to download.
53) DO some background research into what makes web sites work.
54) DON’T make your site boring.
55) DO make the site easy to navigate.
56) DO promote your site.
57) DO give visitors something to register for, or a reason to leave you their email (for example, to register for a free newsletter), so you can build a database of prospects.
58) DON’T send information en masse. Email marketing like this is referred to as ‘Spam’ – electronic junk mail.
59) DO give the recipients of any of your email marketing an opportunity to be deleted from the mailing list.
60) DO invest some time in registering your site with the search engines.
61) DO spend some time identifying the key words for your website – this will dramatically improve your ranking among the search engine listings.
62) DO link your website with other sites if appropriate, as it will likely generate traffic to your site from the other site.
63) DON’T confuse ‘hits’ with unique visitors. The latter measures how many new visitors are coming to your site.
64) DO update your site with news on a regular basis. People will return for ‘new news’.
65) DON’T be scared by internet marketing – get expert advice and you’ll have a new marketing tool!
Public Relations
66) PR is a vital component of the marketing mix because it incorporates many elements: media relations, internal and external communication programs, event management, copywriting, product launches and more.
67) If you want a story covered in the print media, please ensure it:
i. Is newsworthy and offers a ‘hook’ for the journalists to work with
ii. Provides the highlights.
iii. Is directed to the appropriate person
68) Target several publications to maximise your chances of the story being taken up.
69) Provide the story/press release, a photo if appropriate (of you, your new partners, your product, your new customer, etc.), some background on you and/or your business, and contact details for the media person to follow up if required.
Marketing Communication
70) This is a broad term which refers to the ways in which we communicate with our market. Beyond all else, the message must be clear, unambiguous, and consistent
71) In both large and small organisations, internal communication is important too. Keep your staff informed.
72) Never stop communicating with your customers!
73) Communication includes presentation: people, cars, offices, marketing literature, etc.
Sales Channels
74) Consideration must be given to which sales channels you will need to reach your potential customers.
75) A sales channel could be a direct sales team, a retail outlet, a telemarketing centre, an Internet site, or any combination of the above.
76) If you use distributors or third party sales channels, monitor their performance like you would the direct sales team.
77) Make sure your sales team has the necessary information to support their sales efforts.
Customer Management
78) Learn why your customers went with you in the first place, and why they stay with you, so you can repeat this to acquire new customers.
79) You need to understand what your customers want, need and consider to be priorities, and why. Ask them.
80) Most importantly, you need to understand the current and potential value of your customers, and have a plan to maximise that.
81) The real value of a customer is their potential value over a period of time.
82) Make your product or service easy to buy, from the customer perspective.
83) Make it fun to do business with you.
84) Understand what (else) your customers want, and deliver.
85) Focus on building relationships with your customers
86) Aim for referrals from satisfied customers – they are the best way to acquire new business.
Positioning
87) How do you want your product or service to be positioned amongst the minds of your target market?
88) Positioning is all-important in attracting and retaining the right type of customers for your business
89) Positioning is about perception.
90) Don’t position yourself in a market or a segment of the market if you can’t deliver
91) Understand your strengths and where you can deliver benefits to your target market, and focus on those attributes to position yourself in the minds of your prospective customers
92) Be brutally honest with yourself, recognise your real capabilities, and position your product/your business accordingly.
93) Your positioning is always compared with someone else.
94) If you want to be different, then do it, don’t just say it.
95) First impressions are everything.
96) Positioning is about perceptions, and perception is reality. So think long and hard about your positioning so you end up in the right place.
Implementation
97) The best way to make sure your marketing program happens according to plan, is to draw up a project schedule, and have someone in the company responsible for managing it through.
98) DO make roles and responsibilities clear for everyone, with deadlines for achievement of all tasks.
Measurement and follow up
99) Marketing programs require measurement. If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.
100) Set the measurement criteria:
101) And last, but certainly not least, ask for advice. A well-executed marketing strategy, which gets the results, is a joy.
Jenny Stilwell is Managing Director of Meridian Business Group, a Melbourne-based business advisory firm that provides marketing, management and mentoring services to SMEs. She is also the Chairperson of Marketing Women (Victoria).
Email: jenny@mbg.com.au