May 2011’s Top 5 Marketing Tips

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

1. Handle complaints efficiently and effectively – Everyone has customer complaints.  Even if you think you have never had any, you have – it is just that the customer didn’t tell you.

This isn’t good. 

The quiet customer who feels let down, disappointed, even angry, will dwell on their experience and then share it with others.

The customer that doesn’t complain, will take his custom elsewhere.  The customer who is vocal in their complaint is providing you with an opportunity, strange as it may seem, to enhance your reputation in that customer’s eyes.

If you can efficiently and effectively deal with customer complaints you can very quickly turn a negative into a positive – by exceeding their expectations with regards to how you resolve it.

Not only will your company be perceived in a much more positive light – but that customer will love to tell others of how well you dealt with him.  Positive PR!

2. Be distinct or become extinct – When you think of business success stories over the last 20 years, they have all risen to the fore because they are distinctive.

Whether it is the product, the branding, the positioning, marketing campaigns, something has made them distinctive from all of the other players in the market.

Dyson, Innocent, Apple, Jaguar, Nintendo, Sky……The have all had something distinctive that has cut through the market noise and resonated with its target audience.

Not only do you need to be distinctive to break through, but you need to keep on being distinctive – otherwise someone also will be.

The average person is exposed to around 1 million marketing messages a year – being a ‘me-too’ company is not going to get you anywhere.

3. Lose unprofitable customers – Lose customers, lose sales….are you mad?!

Well, believe it or not, not all of your customers will be profitable.

However the problem is that not enough companies actually know which clients are profitable and which aren’t.  You need to know you figures – profit margins, frequency of purchase, time and resource assigned to servicing that client – otherwise you will never know.

80% of your business will come from 20% of your customers – you need to know who these are and start to work out how to phase out your non-profitable client base.

Turnover is vanity – if they aren’t profitable, lose them.

4. R.E.H.A.S.H – ‘Remember, Everyone Has Another Sale Hidden’.

If you take this mentality into your business then you will be amazed at the number of new opportunities that will suddenly appear.  Too many companies think that their marketing efforts end with the sale – however this is when the greatest marketing opportunities arise – such as up-selling, cross-selling and referrals.

Next time you make a sale simply ask your new customer whether they know of anyone else who may also be interested in your product or service, or whether they have any other interesting projects coming up.  You will be amazed where carrying out this simple non-intrusive discipline can lead you – new projects, their client base, suppliers, different departments in the same business, sister companies, friends and family!

And the best thing – it doesn’t cost you a penny and takes 10 seconds of your time!

5. Love your brand – First of all you need to have a company with a strong purpose / mission and strong values which when combined with your identity, your communications and your product or service delivery becomes a strong brand.

You have to feel an inherent part of that brand – it is not something you are projecting but something you truly believe in.  If you believe everything your brand stands for and  communicate this with passion, then that will be instilled within all your staff, your customers and everyone you meet.

Once your people are living the brand, running a successful business becomes a whole lot easier.