Marketing Strategies That Don’t Hurt The Pocket

Marketing is something every business must do to stay in business. A little imagination will make your marketing work better and more economically. This is a selection of some cost-effective ‘tried and true’ strategies that work for SMEs.
Be charitable to yourself

Too many firms donate money to charity and feel they’ve done something for their business. But what if they’d donated their own products or services instead? A donation like this not only benefits the charity but opens up a chance to gain additional business for yourself - and that makes the business a winner too.
Business cards become advertisements

Take a look at your business card and ask: “Is it selling anything?” Think of it as a little billboard that has two sides. The reverse side can be a list of your products or services, or even carry a special offer for favoured customers. Be sure your business card makes it easy to get in touch with you. It should include your street address, telephone number, email and website address.
Invoices can bring in repeat business

When you are sending out invoices you have an opportunity to get some repeat business. You’ve already paid for the envelope and postage; just add some promotional content before it’s mailed. It costs very little to print a leaflet making your customers a once-only offer.
Convert your contacts to customers

Most of the people you know are probably potential customers, especially if you’re giving them your business. Next time you see them, hand out your business card. Ask if there’s anything you can do for them at the time, and let them know you’re available to look after their requirements (or look after the requirements of their friends/associates/customers and so on). This works well if you’re having a special offer and you share it with them. They might be somebody else’s customers now but will give you an opportunity because they know you.
Don’t cut prices – add value

One of the biggest mistakes to make is to cut prices without a full understanding of all the consequences. You might move more of the product, but your profits are naturally a lot less and it’s hard to get the price back up again. Instead, do what smart marketers do and add value to the product. You might be able to bundle a slow moving product with something more popular and create a top value package or bonus as part of a special offer that’s available for a limited time only.
Keep in touch with existing customers

When somebody walks through your door and makes a purchase they’ve given you a chance to acquire a customer for life. That is, if you know how to keep in touch with them. So if capturing customer details isn’t a usual part of the transaction process develop some other way of getting customers to offer them, particularly contact details. Some businesses offer a guarantee for whatever they sell. Customers need to fill out a form for this and it can be a source of valuable information. In-store contests are another way to gain contact details from completed entries. Then use them to develop a direct mail campaign. A regular email is one way to keep in touch, or perhaps a regular newsletter sent out to their home addresses. These can be used for a lot of purposes, from generating awareness of pending sales and special offers, to invitations to product demonstrations and events such as fashion parades.

Become an expert

No matter what business you’re in, you have a specialised body of knowledge not shared by everyone out there. Try writing an article on your area of expertise for the local newspaper. Pick a topic of interest to the paper’s readers and provide some useful tips and tricks that would be helpful to know. Just provide the facts and with a bit of luck you’ll get in print, perhaps even with a photograph in the story. Everybody likes dealing with an expert and it could be you.

For more information or help with your marketing strategy visit http://www.unitymanagement.com.au
or call +(612) 9011 5220.

Developing Quality Marketing Materials On A Budget

Although many businesses cut back on marketing in difficult or uncertain economic times, smart operators continue to market their products and services. They know they can gain market share and cement customer loyalty while their competitors are losing ground.

The challenge in tough times is to continue to market your business effectively, but at a lower cost. However, this doesn’t mean just going down-market. Low cost materials are only low cost if they get results - if they don’t work they are simply a drain on your marketing budget. Marketing must be both low cost and high quality.
Low cost marketing needs to be driven by a high quality marketing strategy. Fortunately, you can develop a marketing strategy yourself. Although you can buy marketing information and specialist advice, you and your team have the best understanding of your business and are best placed to make final decisions on marketing strategy.

Devising a marketing strategy

Your marketing strategy should grow out of a written marketing plan. Although you may feel you don’t need a formal document - and writing one can be very time-consuming - the process of putting thoughts on paper can force you to rethink your marketing in a rigorous way.

For example, you will be required to precisely define your customers in terms of age, gender, occupation, income, education and location. The plan will specify how the features of your product or service will satisfy the needs of your (potential) customers. By defining these features as benefits to your customers, these benefits will then become the focus of your marketing materials.

The plan will also identify your best means of marketing communication, for example, the most appropriate print, radio and Internet advertising options.
The better you understand your customers, the better you can target your marketing materials and the more efficiently you can use your marketing budget. Your marketing message will be more effective because you know your customers’ ‘hot buttons’.
A good marketing plan can also be used to attract investment. Even if it is only for internal use, it can help your team members work towards common goals. It will also provide a marketing overview to give your materials a consistent look and feel.
So, the first step is to get the big picture sorted out. Then you can decide where to cut corners in terms of cost.

It’s unwise to scrimp on certain kinds of marketing material, for example, company brochures. A brochure can be a very useful marketing tool, summing up your company in a few pages, but it needs to be top quality. Potential customers will make assumptions about the quality of your products based on the look and feel of your brochure. The brochure should therefore look distinctive, be well designed, have good quality graphics and be printed on premium stock. All of this costs money.

Seek alternatives to brochures

However, there’s no need to send out an expensive brochure if a postcard will do the job instead. A well-designed postcard can look stunning and its production costs are naturally a lot less than a brochure. You can use postcards for launching new products, introducing yourself to potential customers and announcing sales or promotional events.

A postcard may be cheaper and more effective than a letter. It’s more likely to be looked at (because there’s no need to open an envelope). People may not even need to read it - if the card bears a strong headline you can communicate something at a glance.

In tough times, you are likely to rely more on networking as a low cost method of winning business. Your business card can be a valuable marketing tool in this area. It’s useful if your business or company name makes clear what you do. You can then add a brief tag line to the card that encapsulates the key benefit or unique selling proposition of your products or service.

Resist the temptation to go too down-market on card design. Although you may be able to use desktop publishing software to design cards yourself, a good design grows out of the designer’s skill.

You may not need professional design input for all your marketing materials. For example, a fax cover sheet is an effective low-key marketing tool and can easily carry a message about your business. Promotional faxes are better used with existing clients, however, as nobody likes unsolicited faxes clogging up their machine.
You sometimes need marketing materials to simply keep in contact with your customers. Keeping in touch every six weeks to three months ensures you stay in their minds. This isn’t costly, as you can stay in touch through fliers, emails, faxes or phone calls.

You may find that consistent, low-key contact with clients or prospects will give better results than a single contact with expensive marketing materials. For example, handing out fliers at the cash register can be a good way to build repeat business and increase your customers’ range of purchases.
Giveaways can also be a good way of maintaining your visibility. Put your logo and a tag line on giveaway mugs, for example. Or consider putting your logo on hats, T-shirts, ornaments or mouse pads - even offer your products as prizes in radio contests or competitions at local events.

You can also add value to marketing materials by including a personal touch. Try including a handwritten note, where practicable.
Depending on your line of work, consider writing articles for print or online publications. They can showcase your business’s knowledge and expertise, and only cost you time.

The main thing to remember is that, regardless of cost, your marketing materials are most likely to be effective when they highlight benefits to your customers and include a clear call to action.
The better you understand your customers, the easier it will be to frame your marketing messages. When you get the message right, you will find it much easier to market on a tight budget.

For more information visit: www.unitymanagement.com.au OR call a business professional today on +(612) 9011 5220.

Marketing Tip: implementing one-to-one marketing

The long established principle of listening carefully to customers might have a new name, but one-to-one marketing is one of the most effective ways of developing profitable relationships with customers.

Relationship marketing is being talked about everywhere. Marketing specialists and owners of small to medium businesses are continually being urged to find more effective ways to develop relationships with their customers.

In an ideal world, every enterprise would be able to emulate the owner of the corner store. He knew all his customers, usually by name, and he stored relevant information about them all in his head. Today, it is not so simple. The world is far more complex.

Essentially, one-to-one marketing involves four separate steps:
1. identifying your customers;
2. differentiating your customers;
3. interacting cost-effectively with your customers; and
4. individualising the treatment that you give your customers.
All marketing requires massive amounts of attention to detail. In the case of one-to-one marketing, all four of these steps have to be implemented carefully before worthwhile results are possible.

Identify your customers

To have a relationship with an individual, your first task is to identify individual customers. In a call centre, on your website, or wherever the first point of contact may be, it is important to make every effort to unfailingly identify people as quickly and as cost-effectively as possible. In many situations an investment in caller-ID technology is a sound move. It is important that customer records can be quickly made available to the customer service representatives who answer the phones.

On your website, provide a benefit of one kind or another to people who register themselves. Such a benefit could relate to future purchases or maybe more personalised information.

To identify your customers, you need to use every possible opportunity for winning personal data from otherwise anonymous buyers and inquirers.

Differentiate your customers

A pillar of one-to-one marketing is to acknowledge that different customers have different needs. In the lead-up to developing a relationship you need to get a clear picture of where a customer fits into the overall hierarchy of values and find out what this customer needs that may be different from other customers.
Rudimentary segmentation is essential (eg, do they want a sports car or a 4WD?). Over time, more sophistication can be worked into the segmentation (eg, do they want a large 4WD or a small one, American, Japanese or European?). From the start you must at the very least differentiate on the basis of profitability.

You should always record the source of acquisition. It can be significant in analysis you do down the line that indicates which marketing initiatives are the most effective for attracting new customers who stay with you over the long haul.

Interact cost-effectively with your customers
At this point it is good to drive more and more routine requests into self-service channels, which can significantly free up your call centre, for example. Call centre operators can then spend more time pre-qualifying prospects to ensure personal sales calls are more effective.

Promote your website address to callers on hold when all your service reps are busy. Also, measure critical elements such as the ratio of complaints settled on the first call and the ratio of incoming leads converted to sales calls.

Individualise the treatment that you give your customers
Today, technology empowers you to create a customised product by combining a product or service from dozens, or hundreds, of pre-configured modules. In one way or another, that’s what has to be done. The days of Henry Ford’s “you can paint it any colour, so long as it’s black,” are long gone.

If you can’t individualise the package you are offering, a competitor (somewhere) surely will. And your customers – courtesy of the Internet – will know where to find that competitor.

These are the essential four steps of one-to-one marketing. It must always be a common sense approach. After all, one-to-one marketing is founded on the long established principles of listening carefully to your customers and trying to accommodate them as best you can.

For more information visit: www.unitymanagement.com.au OR call a business professional today on +(612) 9011 5220.

Introducing New Products And Services

Customers are often surprised to discover that a business they've dealt with over a period of time actually offers products and services that they weren’t aware of, but would have purchased from it if they had just known.

When you introduce a new product or service, how do you get the word out to your customers and prospects?

Here’s a couple of simple way to spread the word. You can list new products and services on your fax cover sheets, your invoices, and your emails. Or you can design a postcard that you mail to your customers, or include with outgoing correspondence or packages.

For more information visit: www.unitymanagement.com.au OR call a business professional today on +(612) 9011 5220.

Are You Taking Pot Shots With Your Advertising?

Does your advertising really boost sales? Or is it just lining ad agency pockets? Are you getting the best returns from a slim advertising budget by targeting your media and audience? Or are you taking a blunderbuss approach and hoping for the best?

Do you know which advertising strategies work best for you? Are you sure, or are you guessing?

If you don’t have procedures to measure the results of your advertising, then you’re probably relying heavily on guesswork. And you probably aren’t getting the best bang for your advertising buck. You’ll only know for certain if you measure and track the results of your advertising.

Remember the adage ‘What you can measure you can manage’. If you can measure the results of your advertising, you can assess just where advertising is really boosting your sales - that is, where you earn multiples of each advertising dollar you spend.

‘Too hard! Too much time and effort!’ you might object. And with some justification. You run a small business, and you don’t have a lot of time or resources to operate complicated measurement or tracking programmes. But fortunately there are some simple techniques for assessing your advertising return on investment.
These rules vary according to whether you measure advertising that has been focused on a particular product and designed to get a sale in the short term, or whether it was designed to work long term, influencing buyer attitudes towards your business and building a certain image.

You can test immediate response advertising through:
• Coupons,
• Customer enquiries,
• Hidden offers,
• Split-runs in newspapers,
• Sales monitoring,
• Monitoring retail store traffic,
• Surveys.

You can use coupons that correspond with product sales or customer enquiries and then get an estimate of ad response by tallying up coupon numbers. You can test ad response through hidden offers of the type, ‘Mention this advertisement and get 15 percent off’, or ‘Call this number for more information.’ If you record the number of enquiries you can get some idea of how successful the ad has been.

You can also get newspapers to run two versions of the same advertisement through a ‘split-run’ arrangement. Each version would carry a slightly different offer and you could record which one got the most responses. You could also keep records of sales of advertised and related items in the days or weeks after an advertisement. And you can monitor store traffic after ad campaigns or have people carry out surveys for you.

Measuring attitude advertising takes a little more stamina. This advertising works long term and you need to track the results of a number of advertising campaigns over a period of months. You need to do a bit of analysis so you can tease out the results of one campaign from another, and you need to keep accurate and long term sales records. This allows you to compare sales year-on-year, and judge the individual and cumulative effect of ad campaigns.

If this sounds a little complicated, don’t worry. Your Unity Management professional can help you design a marketing plan, set up Key Performance Indicators to measure results, and assist in data analysis. They can also show you ways to actually improve the conversion rate from initial enquiry to your ads, to a sale so as to further increase the return on your advertising investment.

For more information visit: www.unitymanagement.com.au OR call a business professional today on +(612) 9011 5220.

Getting Closer To Your Customers

Knowing your customers – really knowing who they are and what they want from you - can mean the difference between having a growing business and having one that gradually slips away from its source of income. A business that knows its customers can anticipate opportunities as well as problems and have strategies ready for whatever may arise. For a small and flexible business this presents a great opportunity. It gives you a major advantage over larger competitors who don’t consider that knowing their customers is important. To gain this advantage you’ll have to put in some time and effort. However, it will pay terrific dividends in the long run.

Is your business culture customer focused?

Getting to know your customers will only happen when it’s encouraged by the culture of your firm. Without this focus, team and management alike will not be able to see the opportunities before them, nor will they detect any problems about to arise. If the culture in your business does not encourage a sincere customer focus it’s time to begin a programme of cultural change.
Get some facts together

Any business will benefit from regularly holding a Customer Advisory Board. This is a focus group run with a representative sample of your customers. Bring a group of six to ten customers together into a room to gain insights into what motivates them to purchase from you - and a lot more. You want this process to find the answers to some pretty important questions about what advantages they see you as having over your rivals, or where you need to do some catching up.

It’s worth investing in the services of an outside facilitator to run the Customer Advisory Board; they will advise you on what to be asking about and will provide an objective report of the proceedings. And being outsiders they won’t be tempted to get defensive over any criticism that comes up. That sort of reaction by a facilitator only runs the process off the tracks. Making up the sample of customers to invite along, deciding on the questions, and analysing the data obtained will really work a lot better if handled by somebody with experience in running Customer Advisory Boards.

But for suggestions on what to ask about, such as quality of after sales service and so on, there’s no better source than your own team members who deal directly with customers. They’ll hear the good and the bad before anyone else and will know what issues already concern customers.

Another excellent source of information that can signal which issues to seek information on comes from customer complaints. However, don’t base your whole customer relations strategy on the complaints you receive. Complaints usually come from a minority that isn’t representative of the customer base as a whole.
Do something with what you learn

You can use your findings to identify areas where urgent attention is needed. You can also see where you’re already doing things to the satisfaction of your customers. Knowing your customers and their needs is an ongoing process. Once you’ve set your benchmarks for the level of quality you want to put into customer service you can begin a programme of regular checking with customers to measure your progress as it happens.

Keep in touch with your customers

Give your customers a feeling of participation and let them know you care about their feelings and are working to deliver value. Just as product development can, and should be, an ongoing process, so should the gathering of customer information. With a PC and one of the many simple customer relationship applications around these days you can create and maintain an excellent customer information database. Names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses and any other key details, even birthdays, can be recorded and used to generate reminders to you. Keeping in touch with your customers has never been easier.
Don’t forget prospects

It isn’t enough to get close to only those people who are current customers. If that were the case there would be no growth in any business. You actually have a lot of potential customers among those who have done business with you in the past but have become inactive, as well as all those who may never have bought from you - yet. So customers can be both actual and potential, and you should be constantly stretching out to the potentials.

It really pays to give your customers and prospects ongoing reminders that you value their business. Newsletters, special offers, and birthday cards – all demonstrate that you appreciate their previous visits and are looking forward to their return. Whatever it costs you in time, effort and money to really know your customers and give them service and value that will retain them, is worth it – keeping customers is the best investment you can make.

For more information visit: www.unitymanagement.com.au OR call a business professional today on +(612) 9011 5220.