April 2011 Top 5 Marketing Tips

Below are the top 5 marketing tips for April 2011 – simple tips to help you improve the effectiveness of your marketing.

1. Get an outsiders viewpoint – it is impossible for anyone within a business to view their business objectively.  They are too involved and have to many preconceptions about what it is wrong or right for their business.

Get an outsiders viewpoint – someone who has no involvement with the business and no specific experience of your industry.  They will offer a completely impartial perspective and their fresh view of things will be just like a prospect viewing your business for the first time!

2. Google check your business – the world has changed dramatically over the last 15 years and the impact that the internet and Google in particular has had on peoples buying behavior cannot be underestimated.

Whether you are in a business to business or business to consumer industry, marketing has seen a huge shift from ‘push marketing’ to ‘pull marketing’ or ‘inbound marketing’.  If a prospective customer does not know a specific supplier to fulfill their need they are likely to ask people if they can recommend – or they will turn to Google to find their own recommendations.

You need to make sure that you are found when there is that specific need.  The first stage is to understand the customer search behavior – what sort of keywords are people actually typing into Google to find companies like yours.

Visit the Google Adwords Keywords tool and find out the types of phrases people are searching your industry by and the sorts of volumes of traffic your site could be generating if marketed properly!  You might be surprised just how big an opportunity you are currently missing.

3. Maximise existing client potential – most businesses place 95% of their marketing effort into winning new clients – they view it as the lifeblood of the company.

However it actually costs 6-7 times more money to attract a new client that it does to extract the same value from an existing client.  When you ‘close a sale’ do not view this as the end of the process – it is only the beginning.

Once you have a client on board, they will stay a client for life if you look after them and don’t provide them with a reason to look elsewhere.

You should be farming your existing client base and regularly keeping in contact with them – don’t let them slip through the net.

Market yourself regularly to your existing client base – don’t neglect them in the quest for new clients.

4. Set some measurable goals – so many businesses fail in their marketing activity because they do not have a clear idea of what they are trying to achieve as a business.

Set some goals for the business and be as specific as possible.  Rather than “increase sales in product X” how about “grow sales in product X by £300K over the next 12 months”.

Suddenly you have a clear target and objective against which you can measure performance.  Too many businesses fail to set goals and even those who do are not specific enough!

Your marketing activity should feed from the goals you are trying to achieve.  If you don’t have any – what are you marketing for?

5. Regularly monitor KPI’s – work out what they key performance indicators are within your business and regularly measure and monitor them.  From a marketing perspective the obvious ones are:

• Number of enquiries
• Enquiry source
• Conversion rates
• Number of new clients
• Number of transactions
• Total sales value
• Average transaction value
• Average profit value/margin
• Customer churn

If you know all of these figures you can keep an accurate finger on the pulse of how your marketing activity is performing.

It will enable you to clearly see where there is any bottleneck in the process or cause for concern – are you generating enough enquiries, is the conversion rate high enough, are you making enough margin per transaction?

Once you know these you can make informed decisions that can only improve the performance of your marketing and your business.