A marketing plan or strategy is vital for your business’ success, whatever industry you represent. Quite often a marketing plan is drawn up without any regard for the 1st or 3rd step outlined below. This is potentially the difference between your marketing plan being a success or a failure.
Pre-Marketing
Pre-marketing is the foundation stage of any marketing plan to enable business development. Prior to any marketing, SEO and social marketing, this step ensures that you have the right brand, website, stationery, brochure/catalogue and other related sales and marketing tools in place. This step will ensure you capitalise on your ongoing marketing and sales team activity. It helps you to clarify who you are, what you do, your target audience and their requirements. It informs where you want to be and how you are going to get there. Getting this right is vitally important as all other marketing activities are built on this. It helps to determine your direction and your value in the marketplace.
The value proposition you put forward in any marketing or sales material will help you to establish your competitive advantage over other similar companies. It will help prospects to determine if they feel your offering fits their requirements and if they will buy from you.
Key areas for development:
Brand development/strategy
Marketing strategy
Social media strategy
Creative direction
Stationery/digital stationery
Responsive Website design
E-Commerce development
Brochure/ Catalogue design
SEO Scoping
On screen/tablet presentations
Flyers design
Social media planning
Signage/liveries/workwear
Marketing
Marketing is the implementation stage, where we help you to go about creating opportunities to sell and create awareness of your brand and offering. This is when we take the pre-marketing materials and use them to drive business by reaching prospects with compelling calls to action. Create persuasive content that you will use to provide a two-way conversation with your audience, through calls, direct or digital marketing. We can also look at ways to improve your rankings in search engines, by using a blended strategy of organic social or paid search marketing. The aim for all of the above is to drive more prospects to contact and engage with you, so that you have the opportunity to convert them into a sale.
Key Features:
Direct marketing
Email marketing
Exhibitions/events seminars
Seeding content through networks
Google ad-words campaigns
Blogging content creation
Implement seasonal strategies
Manage SEO campaigns
Create & develop landing pages
Offer/reward campaigns
Re-Marketing
Re-marketing is the ongoing development of your business and brand. This is where you capitalise on the opportunities that we have created through the initial marketing. It gives you the chance to re-engage with customers who have already interacted with your company, to remind them of your products and services, and encourage them to take action. We are driven by conversion and measurement. Re-marketing helps you to convert additional sales as you contact warm prospects again, this helps you to build relationships and stay front of mind while they make their buying decisions.
Please find below, marketing tips 1-5 in our series for successful marketing, plus an expanded description for each in the blog post below.
Think deeply about who you are, what you do, your target audience and your competition, this should set the tone for all creative and marketing outputs from here on in.
Don’t go to market without developing your brand, positioning and ID thoroughly.
What has worked best for you in past could work for you in the future, plan your strategy now, not when you need it.
Be sure you make a plan, stick to it, update it and make a note of what works and what doesn’t.
What do your customers actually ‘want’ from you? Analyse deeply, what do you ‘really’ look like?
Think deeply about who you are, what you do, your target audience and your competition, this should set the tone for all creative and marketing outputs from here on in.
Who are you, no really, who is your company? Who are the employees, what do you stand for and why? Is it value, is it expertise, style or cool. What are the pillars that underline your company and how do you operate? Why does this matter? Well it matters because you are unique, your business is different to anyone else’s and as such your marketing should shout this from the rooftops, ‘we are different to everyone else!’ Your USP is your ally, use it. You don’t want to look like the competition, another ‘me too!’. You need to establish what your real values are before you can provide any marketing. Who are your customers, who would be your ideal customer? Again, nothing goes out until you are sure of it all and more.
Marketing Tip 2
Marketing Tips 2
Don’t go to market without developing your brand, positioning and ID thoroughly.
Like number one, we should take all this fantastic in depth understanding of your business and develop a brand to fully represent it. All this beautiful, unique information about your business is invaluable and you can use it to discover your true position in the market place. Once you understand who you are and what you do, it feeds the development of how you are seen by your customers commercially and visually. It should represent the value you put on your product or service, your tone of voice, it should be effective and appeal to your target audience. Your difference will provide a memory, it will define you.
Marketing Tip 3
Marketing Tips 3
What has worked best for you in past could work for you in the future, furthermore, plan your strategy now, not when you need it.
The most important part of this tip is the timing. I’m not just talking about more complex tactical strategies, I am talking about a more basic perspective. Don’t wait for the quiet times, don’t be satisfied with what you have got. Plan for it now, don’t wait for the recession. Maybe you know when the quiet times will come, diversify, consider them early on and don’t keep making the same old mistakes, look back to look forward.
Marketing Tip 4
Marketing Tips 4
Be sure you make a plan, stick to it, update it and make a note of what works and what doesn’t.
I know this sounds a little like tip 3 but I believe it requires some more detailed analysis. Its about being consistent but remaining flexible and open to change. When you have developed this well thought out plan, don’t just stop if it doesn’t work, keep going, it may be a question of campaign length for it to work i.e. one newspaper ad may not get you anywhere, a six-month campaign will bring much better results.
Alternatively
You may need to develop the strategy, continue to update the plan, tweak the outputs and your proposition. Everything we do in life usually involves an update and I don’t just mean the apps on your smartphone, although this is a pretty good example. Most software application business’ have a team of people continually improving the functionality of its product. It might mean smoothing the edge of a button or providing a different outcome for a certain logical process, but the development plan is the same as in marketing. Most of all, its goal is to appeal to and delight more and more users based on the target market. Like in marketing its designed to work, but it can always work a little better. Better marketing means better clients.
Continue to update and develop the marketing output to achieve the desired results. Stick to this plan going forward and update it constantly to move one step closer to your goal. Refine your sales, lose the customers you don’t want and keep the kind of clients you value most. Improve your ‘value proposition’ to potential customers and get the ones you want. Your marketing can do this for you, if you stick to, analyse and update your plan.
Marketing Tip 5
Marketing Tips 5
What do your customers actually ‘want’ from you. Analyse deeply, what do you ‘really’ look like?
Improve your credibility, your customer, your visibility. A potential customer will judge you harshly and it will only take them a few seconds to do so. Your window of opportunity is short and so this is the reason why I recommend you take your marketing seriously. You hold the answers and you are great at what you do, but are you really a marketing professional? If you are honest with yourself and believe me, you must be brutally honest, you will get results.
If you are serious about your business, you should be able to ask yourself some really challenging questions. For example, is your business card rubbish? Do you look too cheap? Is your website old fashioned, does it look a bit dated? is the logo a slightly different style in several different examples of your marketing? does your business look like it has any credibility?
BE HONEST. Your business is your livelihood, why would you not take it seriously right?
BE HONEST with yourself, don’t ask friends and family, they are more likely to tell you how great you are!
Find a real marketing professional or agency who will challenge you, but don’t be offended. They won’t hold any emotional attachment, they will view you impartially, just like a potential customer or client. Just because Sarah in accounts is great at adding lovely visual filters to her holiday snaps, does not mean she can run your marketing. So many small businesses make this mistake, indeed external agencies can refresh what can usually bog down internal marketing departments.
Your customers can discount your offering in a millisecond and will judge you instantly. They are fickle, they are dazzled, they need reassurance and they will judge a book by its cover. Your marketing isn’t just informational, it should be transformational. Make sure your cover is good and make sure you can live up to it or else you will ultimately fail. So unless you are incredibly fortunate, make your own luck.
Analyse your business in depth either at the beginning or during a business refresh, or what we call in the trade, re-positioning your business. It will help you to understand your brand, positioning and business identity. Ultimately it will define the image you can live up to, keep it consistent in your marketing and honest in your approach. Your customers will look to you for honest answers. The truth is in you, you just need to know where and how to apply it.
Your Call to ‘Marketing Action’
If you want to discuss your business marketing in more detail why not call us here @ The Marketing People on 01543 495752 and ask Richard about our free ‘business focus’ consultation. Alternatively email richard.brooks@themarketingpeople.com
Challenge yourself, challenge your business, create more opportunities to sell.
Anthony John Salons is an award winning hair salon based in the beautiful Heart of the Country Shopping Village near Lichfield. The salon is situated within a stunning, spacious barn conversion; the brand simply oozes sublime quality and luxury. It is THE hair destination.
Having started working with Tony, the founder at Anthony John Salons a good few years back, The Marketing People helped create the beautiful brand we know today. Of course, we did a few other bits too; we developed the website, designed and produced all the signage, the price lists, the appointment cards the gift vouchers ………stop us here, we could go on and on and on!
As we all know technology moves at a fast pace and keeping up with it can be challenging. It was time to revisit the original website and move ahead with a new fully responsive site that would be a beautiful showcase for the salon.
The project started by planning as all marketing projects should. If we could make that word PLANNING shout out at people when they are reading this, we would (Hmmm maybe we should develop an app for that). Planning is essential, that is why when we work with our clients, even those we have worked with for years we go back to the beginning and take a look at the bigger picture – it is not just about building a website.
With the brief agreed we went about producing wireframes that showed how each element of the site would work and how the structure and navigation would sit. Our designers worked closely with the client to select the right imagery and photography alongside our copywriters offering content guidance and creation.
Once all these elements were in place our talented marketing, content design & development team got to work, and the result is the fabulous responsive website you can now feast your eyes upon.
And what’s the point in a responsive website, you already have a website right?
Whether we like it or not we live in a multi-device world. Mobile web traffic has exceeded that of the personal computer; you cannot ignore the stats. Having a mobile/pad friendly site is not just a nice to have it is an absolute must! It is like having a high-street shop but keeping the door locked! People know you are there but can’t get in.
Fully responsive across all tech is, of course, a must for today’s savvy web searchers. For those of you who are not quite sure what responsive means:
Whether people are searching for your business or services on their phone, their pad, their TV or any other form of web-enabled techsearchery device they will be able to view your website perfectly without the horrible frustration of it not displaying as it should. Its simple if you pop out to buy milk from Tesco’s and its closed you go somewhere else don’t you. You do not wait around parched for Tesco’s to open again!
Eggscuse the pun, we only get the chance once a year! Here at The Marketing People, we all enjoy watching what’s going on in the world of Marketing. Easter is a great time of year for companies to use their imagination, and after much debate in the office, these are our favourite Easter Marketing campaigns.
Aldi – Lunch for the Price of an Easter Egg
If you can use the Easter holiday to market your home brand Mint Sauce, you’re definitely doing something right. Calculating the price of a decent Easter Egg at £3.80, the German retailer put together a tasty lunch, including dessert and wine, for the same price! Between a family of four, it would cost £3.80 per head for a lamb dinner, with vegetables, mint sauce, hot cross buns for dessert and a white wine to compliment it. This marketing campaign didn’t just show off their value prices, it did it in style:
Honey, could you pass the chocolate?
Aldi employed the work of Jen Lindsey Clark, chocolate artist, to create a full sized table with a roast dinner made entirely of chocolate. Three weeks, and 50kg of Aldi Easter Egg chocolate later, Jen created everything from cutlery, peas, and wine out of chocolate. They even had a chocolate chair! We’d love a chocolate meeting table in the office but we’re worried Sammy of The Marketing Dogs would sniff it out and eat it during a meeting!
The Co-operative Food – The Good Eggs
Social Experiments are always risky business when it comes to television and internet campaigns. Sometimes the message isn’t as intended, causing controversy. When they work, they’re brilliant and go viral. UK retailer The Co-operative came up with a great idea for a social experiment last Easter, in which a gentleman with his arms in casts would sit on a park bench and struggle to eat his food. Many people walked past and left the man to struggle, but some ‘good eggs’ would help the man eat his sandwich. The Good Samaritans were awarded with Easter Eggs for their troubles.
The reason we love this stunt from The Co-op is the genuine sentiment behind it. Good marketing is always interesting, but it’s even better when it warms your heart at the same time.
Happy Egg Co. – Chick Cam
Talk about a long campaign, the Happy Egg Company ran their Easter Marketing Campaign for the entire lifetime of an egg! We absolutely love this one. Through mid- March up until Easter, The Happy Egg Co. live streamed some incubated chicken eggs, with the stream ending with newly born chickens hatching, and learning to walk!
The Happy Egg Co.’s Google Hangout went viral, for good reason, with people from all around the world tuning in to watch the baby chickens peck away from the inside of their eggs and break free. We all agreed that this was a great use of current technology for viral marketing. The Happy Egg Co. boosted their social presence by inviting the public to name the newly born chicks, sending their Twitter Facebook pages skyrocketing with engagement, they even appeared in the UK trending Tweets for a short while.
Whiskas – Earster Cats
We love animals here at The Marketing People, but you can see that by the blog that The Marketing Dogs write! We really enjoyed this next one, Whiskas grappled the huge iPhone and Android app market (2 BILLION PEOPLE!) by releasing an app that gave users an Augmented camera that put giant bunny ears on their cats. We thought it was genius that cat food could be marketed by virtual bunny ears! Unique marketing campaigns are always great, especially when they have such a huge potential audience. This was a truly imaginative way to get the message out there for Whiskas Cat Food.
We wonder if George will sit this still for a selfie
This was one of our favourites, but we’re not sure how Sammy, George and Chops would like a giant pair of ears. Leave us a comment below on who you think should get the Whiskas Earster treatment and keep an eye on the blog for an update.
Tesco – Find the Eggs
We’ve spoken about Pokemon Go on this blog before, and as readers out there know, we thought it was marketing genius. But, three years before it existed, Tesco used the same technology in their #FindtheEggs game. Tesco used a Google Maps based app to get people out and about hunting for virtual eggs, the players who went out and found three eggs would win a chocolate bunny from their local Tesco store.
What we love about this one, is that not only was it a massive viral marketing campaign for Tesco, it also gave people a reason to play it. With prizes such as chocolate bunnies and Samsung tablets, being involved in this campaign was genuine, unlike superficial campaigns that you see today.
Integrated marketing services that are proven to deliver results.
Get in touch if you are serious about improving your marketing returns.
Call 01543 387 047
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