Marketing

The problem of defining a marketing budget

March 25, 2010 Leave a Comment

This is a guest post from Crispin Read, co-director of Optimum Financials, specialist bookkeepers and accounts support. As Crispin knows a thing or two about how to use accounts to guide business decisions, I asked him for his experiences when it comes to deciding on a marketing budget.

Google for ‘How Much Should I Spend On Marketing’ and you are going to get about a half million pages of suggestions – from the sublime to the ridiculous; from everything you can afford to a clinical 20% of all revenue.

Taking the cold hard 20% of revenue as an example, let me tell you my story as a specialist bookkeeping service of three staff serving Lincolnshire and the East Midlands.

The routes we chose

The majority of marketing that we do at Optimum Financials is:

Telemarketing
Membership of tight referral networking groups
Loose networking groups
Advertising
Web-based approach including new website, blogging, and email marketing

Quantifying results

Clearly the ideal is to know your target market and the channels you need to use to get to them, so that they can choose your products and services. One of the first steps that we took was to engage a marketing consultant who specialises in supporting SMEs to help us define these very points. After this, however, when you are starting out there is a temptation to spend as much as you can afford until you can work out what works and what doesn’t.

So, the most important question became, ‘how can we quantify which marketing method is the most effective?’ because, as one commentator has said: you have to insure against those impulse decisions which may result in nothing.

Because there are many ways in which you can calculate your marketing budget I suggest it matters not which method you choose, only that you quantify the results. After all, this decision is like any other business decision – you need to show a return on your investment. So whether you decide to invest 20% of revenues on Marketing, or everything that you can afford, each marketing method will have costs and revenues which must be quantified allowing you to calculate that ‘return on investment’ (ROI) .

Our marketing results

In terms of ‘getting out to the market’ – we do this well, we do a lot of marketing. Some of this is a time investment, and some is an outsourcing investment. Ultimately, based on what we have said must be done, we calculate our marketing AND sales based on the ROI as we see below:

The jury is still out on web-based marketing, although as with each method with the exception of telesales/marketing there is a fairly long lead time and I don’t expect technology to provide any quicker results – just a quicker way to achieve a presence.

Factors influencing your return

In conclusion, my results suggest that doing almost anything consistently will produce a return. That return will be dependent upon:

What type of business you are
The value of your product/service
How likely you are to gain repeat purchases
The cost of the marketing method

And if you don’t know how to answer those questions, well – that’s when you might need to ask for help.

Are you a blogger? March is Be My Guest month, and we’re encouraging bloggers from all over the world to swap posts and reach new audiences. See Be My Guest for more information.

Filed Under: Guest posts, Marketing Tagged With: budget, budgeting, internet marketing, Marketing, networking, return on investment, ROI

How to use public relations to support every stage of the sales funnel

March 4, 2010 1 Comment

This is a guest post from Bryony Thomas, Chief Clear Thinker, Clear Thought Consulting Ltd.

Most people initially think of public relations as a technique for generating awareness for their products or services. This is absolutely true, but if this is the only way that you’re using your public relations effort, you’re missing a trick in squeezing every ounce of value from your marketing budget.

In considered purchases, people move through a process of decision-making. At each stage, you have an opportunity to influence whether they continue through to purchase from you, or choose to look elsewhere.

Using Kotler’s model of rational decision-making, here are some ideas for using PR at every stage in the process.

Generating awareness: In addition to getting the word out through press coverage, you can also:

Add key phrases to your press releases that people are likely to use as search phrases.
Post links to your news coverage on your LinkedIn status, Twitter feed, etc.
Add comments against online news stories that your audience is likely to read.

Generating interest: This is about getting people to take the next step of not only knowing who you are, but of being interested in what you have to say:

Use decent coverage as an insert for direct mail or email (NB You’ll need permission).
Use snippets of coverage you achieve in your promotional materials.
Post a response to a news item as a blog, YouTube video, etc.

Standing up to evaluation: When people are evaluating your products or services against the competition, you can:

Point them to positive news coverage.
Use a news story as the basis for a live Q&A or webinar.

Supporting the trial process: When someone is assessing your products and services in detail, you can:

Add PR quotes in your proposal documents to substantiate your claims.
Use press coverage as a reason to drop someone a line when they’re trialling.

Encouraging adoption: At the point where people part with significant money, public relations can:

Create a feel-good factor amongst the wider decision-makers reducing chances of them saying no.

Generating re-purchase and loyalty: If they’ve bought once, you can:

Drop them a line with positive coverage on what they’ve bought for that all-important post-purchase reassurance.
Keep them up-to-date on new offerings by sending them links to press coverage – often more compelling than blatant sales material.

With a bit of thought, you can make more of your PR coverage. This is particularly true if you have a social media set-up in place that allows you to make intelligent re-use of the coverage you’ve worked hard to secure.

For more on this and a few more ideas, you can watch a 10-minute tutorial on how PR supports the sales funnel on the Clear Thought website.

Are you a blogger? March is Be My Guest month, and we’re encouraging bloggers from all over the world to swap posts and reach new audiences. See Be My Guest for more information.

Filed Under: Featured, Guest posts, Marketing, Public Relations Tagged With: Marketing, pr, Public Relations, sales, sales funnel

Branding: position yourself at the front

March 1, 2010 1 Comment

This is a guest post by Gary Marshall, a designer and brand director with 17 years of industry experience dealing with international blue-chips and exciting SMEs. He helps to bring brands alive and increase their profit.

Recently, PC World put out a e-shot which included an offer on Apple Macs. The response among some of my Twitter followers was one of surprise – they didn’t think that particular store would stock the Apple range. Now technically speaking, the Apple Mac is a PC (Personal Computer), along with many other leading brands, but the truth is most people don’t see it that way, including Apple.

Why? It’s all about branding. In a competitive marketplace, why try and fight for market share when you can create a marketplace of one: you?

A marketplace of one

Now when most people start a company, they usually begin in one of two positions. They either believe they have had a eureka moment and invented something totally unique to the world that nobody has ever seen or thought of before (whether this is true or not), or they see a market leading company and set up an identical offering, believing they can become market leader themselves by copying the what has gone before.

Often, what the real market leaders do is a mixture of the two. Most recognise the huge value of a current market (for example, PCs) but realise that to take on the market leaders successfully would require a hard slog and lots of money. So, they create a new market within an existing market.

Apple used creativity and design to appeal to a market of professional designers and creatives. Now most people have only been introduced to Apple in the last five years or so, but I remember using them nearly 20 years ago when no one knew who they were. They positioned themselves in a market of one within a busy sector.

A league of their own

Apple are not the only example of ‘league creation’. There are a plethora of brands offering “vacuum cleaners” but Dyson have positioned themselves as the only cleaner that doesn’t use a bag. Similarly, Google wasn’t the first to market, but understood what it took to become the market leader.

Procter & Gamble with their Pringles snack are another example of the same principle. Recently, and in the interests of avoiding VAT charges, they went to court to try to convince the government that Pringles were not a potato based snack because the product is 33% fat and flour. Although the case was thrown out, the case illustrates how Pringles defines itself in a league of one. The combination of product, branding and pack format ensure that for most consumers it is, at essence, a Pringle and not a crisp.

The lesson here: to become a market leader, choose an established marketplace, but be the first to claim a distinct niche.

Filed Under: Featured, Guest posts, Marketing Tagged With: Apple, brand, branding, Dyson, Hoover, market leader, Marketing, PC, personal computer, Pringles, Proctor & Gamble

Get social media into your business

February 25, 2010 3 Comments

This is a guest post by James Ainsworth of Marketing Donut.

The hype of social media is at times, a near spiritual fever. Understand this, NOT everybody is doing it. Don’t panic and don’t rush into it because of all the noise surrounding social media. Those who are prepared to incorporate it as one element of a wider marketing strategy are the small businesses that prosper. @Pearcafe, @BrothersCider and Crystal Jewels all use various platforms well.

You shouldn’t introduce social media as a marketing practice to your operation if it doesn’t serve a true purpose.

In order to ascertain a need, it is imperative that you adopt a ‘Them’ and ‘Us’ mind-set. What do you want from it and what do you think your customers might like to gain from your presence on social media channels?

If you are thinking of getting involved, the more the merrier, just make sure it is a commitment you can sustain and above all, from which you and your customers can benefit. Social media is for you as much as it is for them.

Give it a go but don’t expect the rapture of instant business that you may have been led to believe is available. Build a following and work with it to create organic and tangible business growth.

Filed Under: Featured, Guest posts, Marketing, Social Media Tagged With: business, business growth, Marketing, Social Media, targets

Audio marketing for business

February 2, 2010 Leave a Comment

voice to microphone audio content

This is a guest post by voiceover artist Richard Heathcote. While working together on a couple of projects, I asked him to outline the business case for audio content online. Here’s his answer.

In the current business world, we’re becoming more and more tech savvy, and, to an extent, dependent on multimedia. We’ve got everything from YouTube to online radio, picture galleries and podcasts, amongst huge amounts of others.

Certainly in the business world, we’re expecting to see more of it on people’s websites, rather than just them being all text with the odd token stock image of people in suits standing by water coolers. The use of video and audio on sites is becoming increasingly common: either a short corporate video on the homepage, an audio welcome giving some simple website navigation advice or help, or as is becoming increasingly common, the on-screen floating presenter giving a visual welcome.

Get your message heard loud and clear

Audio wise, there are several impactful ways of attracting your audience’s attention when they land on your home page. For instance:

welcome messages, (always opt-in – there’s nothing worse than things blaring at you without your control!) that will direct you around the website;
audio versions of your FAQ pages;
radio style web adverts that can appear anywhere on your site and promote what you do or a special offer you currently have on.

Quality wise, these would be the kind of things that you would expect to hear on any radio station.

A new and different audience

The main benefit of using audio for your business is that it can ‘hit’ an audience that perhaps you wouldn’t have had access to before. For those of you who have a basic understanding of Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP), wordy websites are great if the visitor prefers absorbing information in a text format, not so good if the person prefers to receive information in a visual, kinesthetic or audio way.

By using lots of different types of multimedia, you stand a far better chance of getting your message across to lots of different, and new, people, which ultimately stands you in better stead of winning more new clients from it.

Ultimately, it’s also about being wholly accessible to many different types of people, following the same logic to the ‘accessible to all’ rules set out by the Disability Discrimination Act: giving across all your information in as many formats as possible to please as many people as possible.

Proactive audio marketing

So, by now let’s say you have audio on your website. That’s only really any good if people happen to be on it! You need to get the word out to people that you have lots of mutimedia for them to digest. Which is where we come on to podcasts.

A podcast can often be thought of as a mini business radio show. It’s a piece of audio that gives a radio-style sound, that is totally branded up for your business, talking about current events, offers, news, and general information that your audience will find interesting and appealing.

Podcasts are a fantastic way of getting your message across proactively, especially when combined with an existing e-marketing campaign. With an audio option, your audience can be getting on with something else but taking in much of the information within that podcast subconsciously; like when you listen to the radio and suddenly hear your favourite song, or you hear your name mentioned, you just automatically tune in to the bits that are of interest to you.

The other benefit with audio: you can pack a lot into a short amount of time. One minute of audio is roughly the equivalent of one page of reasonably dense A4 text. Some people (non-text people) could be put off reading that much of a company’s information, but don’t feel that listening for 60 seconds is a long time.

Bring on the traffic

The biggest plus point with audio and all multimedia is how viral it can be. It’s material that is easily passed on to other people (for example, ‘re- tweeted’ if you’re using Twitter). It’s ease of integration into social media applications such as YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, or whatever you may use is highly powerful.

It’s relatively easy to publicise your audio and video clips in various social media campaigns to draw traffic to your site. In this way, audio is another tool to attract visitors from the start, keep them there, and also, in an ideal world, (with regularly changing content), keep people coming back regularly for more.

Filed Under: Featured, Guest posts, Marketing Tagged With: audio, audio content, business, Marketing, podcast, voice marketing, voice over, voiceover

Seminars to boost your social media marketing strategy

January 26, 2010 Leave a Comment

Fresh Business Thinking is holding a Hit Me! Social Media and Search event on 30th March 2010 at Microsoft’s London Office.

The event’s seminars will cover:

Search engine optimisation
Pay per click advertising
Social networks
The social media landscape, and
Link building

Guest speakers will include ‘Twitter expert’ Mark Shaw and Realwire CEO Adam Parker.

Tickets for the event start from £145 + VAT, and the event runs from 9.30am – 5.30pm.

For more information, visit the Hit Me! Social Media and Search booking page.

Filed Under: Events, Marketing, Social Media Tagged With: business, event, Marketing, Social Media, social networking, twitter

Has your sales team shone through the downturn?

September 28, 2009 Leave a Comment

Rowing teamwork

With the economic downturn putting pressure on budgets across the board, the job of sales and marketing professionals has proved particularly tough.

If your sales or marketing team has achieved outstanding results in spite of the recession, you may be in with a chance of scooping an accolade at the British Excellence in Sales & Marketing Awards.

There are 13 awards on offer:

Sales/Sales & Marketing Director of the Year
Sales/Sales & Marketing Team of the Year
Sales/Sales & Marketing Team of the Year
Sales Trainer of the Year
ISMM Student of the Year (sponsored by the ISMM)
Sales Manager of the Year
Sales Professional of the Year
Sales Professional of the Year
New Sales Professional of the Year
Most Effective Use of Sales Automation
Sales Support/Customer Service Team of the Year
Telesales Professional of the Year
Young Sales Professional of the Year

Each entry costs £35+VAT, but is free to ISMM members. All nominations must be made by 16th November 2009.

The shortlist of six finalists will be publicised on the ISMM website and in Winning Edge magazine, making this a great opportunity for exposure, even before the winners are announced on 11th February 2010.

For more information, visit BESMA 2009.

Filed Under: Awards Tagged With: business, customer service, downturn, Marketing, sales, telesales

The first and the last word in charity adoption

September 25, 2009 3 Comments

As is pretty obvious from the title of this blog, words are my business. I spend most of my waking hours choosing them carefully, writing them out, looking back through them, talking them through with colleagues, clients and friends, tweaking an adjective here and an imperative there to (hopefully) produce the perfect copy.

So, when I came across the Adopt a Word initiative that allows you to ‘adopt’ a word for charity, my first thought was, “What word shall I get?” and my second was, “What a great idea!”

I’ve written about fundraising and the importance of a theme/activity that inspires people before, and the Adopt a Word concept strikes me as a little bit of genius. Everyone I mentioned it to knew immediately which word or words they wanted most.

Head over to the Adopt a Word website and you’ll see that this project has plenty going for it: a concept you can get on board with, a worthy cause, celebrity endorsement (lots of), and even merchandise to show off your newly adopted word.

All funds raised go to I CAN, the creators of the project. I CAN is the children’s communication charity, which aims to ensure that no child is left behind because of a difficulty speaking or understanding.

Its mission:

“To make sure that everyone in contact with children knows how important communication is, what a communication problem looks like, and what they can do to help.”

So, the core concept – words – is very closely tied to the charity it supports. The Adopt a Word concept gets prospective donors thinking about words, and realising how much they value communication, which helps to highlight the importance of the I CAN cause – excellent stuff.

Clare Horwood , Head of Individual Giving  at I CAN,  was kind enough to run me through the background to the project:

“Adopt a Word is one of our fundraising campaigns to raise money from individuals. Alternative gifts are a great way for charities to increase their donations, but it’s a fairly crowded market.

“Obviously, we can’t use goats or pandas so words, which are at the heart of our cause and the building blocks of communication were the natural choice.

“By putting words up for adoption we hope to make their importance understood in the context of children with communication difficulties. Also, because words have such a broad appeal it means we can extend our reach beyond the traditional donor and way out into the twitterverse!”

The initiative has been running since October 2008, but recently received a boost when Stephen Fry purchased ‘wordy’, sparking a flood of donations. I think with another push on social media and via more traditional marketing and PR channels, it could receive much wider exposure.

Adopt a Word’s Twitter persona (@adoptaword) is starting to make waves but as with any initiative, there will be areas for improvement and the guys at I CAN are (unsurprisingly) great to communicate with, so I’m betting all suggestions are welcome.

Personally, I have suggested adding PayPal as a payment option and adding a button so that people can push a message to Twitter about their adoption. What do you think?

(Thank you to @reedwords for making me aware of this. And in case you’re wondering, I bought ‘social’)

Filed Under: Marketing, Public Relations, Social Media, Writing Tagged With: charity, communications, giving, Marketing, pr, Public Relations, words

Are you a live wire in business?

July 30, 2009 Leave a Comment

Electric spark wire

If you are known for your grand and unusual ideas, the Shell LiveWIRE ‘Grand Ideas’ Awards could be for you.

Each month, a ‘Grand Ideas’ award is bestowed upon a bright young business, along with £1,000 in cash.

If you’re in your first six months of trading, and think you’ve got an innovative idea in one of the fields listed below, these awards could provide you with a welcome cash boost:

Guerrilla marketing
Viral videos or games
Prototypes
Launch parties / events
Legal advice for an off-the-wall idea

To enter, you must be aged between 16 and 30 and have been trading for six months or less on the deadline date of the competition. This month, that’s 31st July 2009.

Alternatively, the Shell LiveWIRE Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award 2009 is an annual award with a prize of £10,000 for the winner.

The deadline for entry is 11th September 2009 and according to the organisers:

The winner of this award will need to show how they are entrepreneurial, that they have a robust business model, understand their marketplace and have a clear business development strategy.

For this award, entrants must be aged between 16-30 and have been trading for between three and 18 months.

Entry forms and more information about both awards can be found at Shell LiveWIRE Awards, though registration is required.

Filed Under: Awards Tagged With: business, entrepreneur, innovation, Marketing, young, young entrepreneur