Total Marketing Solutions

With the sound of belts tightening already echoing throughout the land, now more than ever is the time to make sure that your price position is protected. It’s true that cutting price is one way of giving your customer better value, but this can be a dangerous route to take - particularly if it is actually unnecessary. It comes down to understanding just how your customers perceive value, before you start offering them “more.” As marketing consultants some of our clients have in the past looked to offer a product or service at a cheaper price, but have not necessarily seen a sudden surge in sales. They had not understood the needs of their real customers - not the purchasing department - but the people who were actually using their service or product. And this made is difficult for them to understand the real value of the product or service they were offering.

Value comprises a mix of costs and benefits. Costs not only consist of the actual price paid, but also perhaps the potential cost of a late delivery or faulty product. Understanding how you can help your customer with all the “costs” associated with buying from you will give you more of an insight into how much real value you can offer. As for benefits, there are of course the functional “it does what it says on the tin” benefits - product capabilities, performance etc - and also the more ephemeral emotional benefits such as confidence in the brand and its acceptability to customers.

It is in really understanding the benefits you are able to offer to help your customers business that will enable you to stand out from the crowd and take the pressure off price. By being able to demonstrate the real value of each of your benefits to your decision-makers, you should be able to protect your pricing and avoid an unnecessary knee-jerk reaction.

I delivered a 1-day workshop on implementing a Key Account approach to sales for one of our most important clients earlier this week and I was struck by just how essential it is for sales and marketing to be joined at the hip if this strategic approach to sales development is to be fully effective.

Now this shouldn’t be a revelation and by and large it wasn’t to the participants on the workshop, who were all very experienced and high quality sales professionals, but as we progressed through the day it became clear that it can be easy for sales people - even experienced ones - to drop into a silo mentality and not really see the need for a truly symbiotic relationship with their marketing colleagues when faced with the challenge of winning and development those key accounts that are the key to driving growth in both revenues and profitability.

These key accounts need to be treated as ‘markets of one’ with an individual sales AND marketing plans developed and implemented if their potential is to be fully realised. We had everybody on board with this way of thinking by the end of the workshop but it wasn’t completely plain sailing!

Our last post was going to neatly lead onto the importance of marketing planning (click here for our official take on the importance of developing a good marketing plan.) But then a piece on the BNET report by business coach Ian Sanders outlined the approach taken by one Joe Oliver, of eco-entertainment consultancy Bash Creations. Whilst many would argue that in today’s landscape having a marketing plan cast in stone is far less appropriate than a flexible approach to a fluid marketplace, Joe actually has no marketing plan at all.He has found that his more liberated approach has enabled his company to be more enterprising and more robust for survival in difficult times. He has four tips for navigating your way through the unpredictable business landscape without a big strategic plan:


1.    Think fluid. Don’t get stuck to a rigid strategic plan. Instead, see where the water flows and trust your instincts — not your spreadsheet — in pursuing new options. Make sure your business is agile enough to react to market trends or new innovations in technology. If you spot a new opportunity, you don’t have to check it’s on the plan first — just go for it.
2.    Prototype. Test your ideas in the real world. Better to launch beta versions of your website, so you can evaluate and tweak as you go, rather than trying to perfect the model before you launch. Otherwise you might never get the site off the ground.
3.    Reinvent. Learn to love change and be prepared to rethink what you do and how you do it. Maybe your business feels a bit stale, a bit stuck. You might need to shake up your organization so your clients start thinking differently about you. Re-energize your organization by taking your team on an ‘away day’ to brainstorm new ideas; think laterally about how you can re-engineer your offering to grow the business.
4.    Think goals, not plans. Set objectives for the year: deadlines to meet, products to launch. It’s important to know what you want to achieve — if not necessarily how you’ll get there. This allows you to think big without initially worrying about the details. A goal may be “I need to get a new client every month.” Perhaps you don’t have a strict linear plan for how you’ll actually achieve that — you just start off the instinctive way: word of mouth, social networking, client meet-and-greets, and so on.  You can’t chart this activity on a graph, but mentally focusing on the goals will help you reach your desired outcome.

Ian argues that a timeline or a spreadsheet can’t capture those opportunities that arise from serendipity and random meetings, but if you remove the traditional business planning mindset, you’ll be liberated to grow your business in line with how the world really changes — not with what it says on a spreadsheet.
It’s a brave stance and not for everyone, but it certainly seems to suit the way Joe works and has been able to develop his business. So perhaps in this new economic landscape of 2010 it’s time to take a look at how you work and how you are best able to grow your business - choosing the appropriate path somewhere between “planned to within an inch of your life” and the rather freer approach adopted by Joe. To find out more about our thoughts on marketing planning and marketing plans follow this link.

Following on from last week’s post, what happens once you’ve got a clear idea of where you want to take your business and have a carefully crafted business and marketing plan? If it’s early days for your company then it’s time to think about developing a clear, concise marketing strategy to help you achieve your objectives. If you already have a marketing strategy, given the significant changes in the economic landscape over the past year, it’s also a good idea to revisit your strategy to check for relevance. You may well have been treading water for the past year or so in terms of marketing activity. But during this time, how far have you deviated from your initial marketing strategy in order to survive? And how do you get back on track?

Whether developing a marketing strategy from scratch, or helping clients find their way back to where they want to be, as marketing strategy consultants we ask our clients to think about three key areas:

1. Identify just how much your competitive landscape has changed. Have any new competitors emerged? If so, what are similar services of products are they offering? How have your existing competitors changed in how they tackle this new geography? Understanding how your existing and new competitors are looking to tackle the new landscape of 2010 will help you better position yourself in the market and ultimately better compete against all competitors.

2. Re-examine your target market. Time spent researching any changes amongst your target market in buying trends will give you a clear picture of who your customer is, what influences their buying decisions and what changes they are facing. Again, a clear understanding of your customers will enable you to position yourself appropriately and compete more effectively.

3. How relevant is your product or service? Whilst you may have been chasing every sale at all costs in recent times - and understandably so - this can sometimes dilute the unique set of  benefits you are able to offer. Rewriting your positioning statement can be a very useful way to make sure you are clear about what you offer, who to, and why people should buy from you. Being clear about what you offer makes it easier to communicate your particular benefits to your chosen target markets, making for more effective marketing.

Once you have a clearer strategic marketing direction, you can then set about developing appropriate marketing plans to bring real results. To find out more about how to develop effective marketing plans and marketing planning please follow this link.

We’re always keen to stress just how much work we put into the initial research stages of any project we undertake, how getting and then interpreting the right information informs how we develop an appropriately effective marketing strategy further down the line. But just what do we mean by research - and is it really worth investing time and effort into finding out stuff our customers might already know anyway?

The answer is yes! As strategic marketing consultants we strive to ensure we get the strategic thinking right, and to do this we need to have a clear understanding of the market and of our client’s customers. Whilst we also dig deep into the hidden recesses of our clients to gain a profound understanding of how they work and why, we also take the time to really get to grips with the outside world too. So just what sort of information do we look for and where do we find it?

Firstly, we identify who we want to talk to. Current and lapsed customers as well as potential customers all provide valuable insight from different angles - some not always favourable but nevertheless critical to understanding the role our client plays in their lives. We also might speak to industry bodies or organisations as well to build as full a picture as possible of the landscape in which our client competes both in the present and in the future.

Once we’ve identified our targets, what are we going to ask them? Generally, in order to really make the most of each contact without eating into too much of their day, the information we gather falls into 3 main categories:

1. Their take on the particular market sector - any trends, issues, challenges which are impacting on them.

2. Specific issues to them within their organisation relative to the are we’re researching - their opinion, understanding, experiences in order to build a full picture of the challenges they are facing.

3. If they are/were a customer, an in-depth, warts-n-all look at their take on the client in question. Here it’s important not to shy away from asking any questions which may elicit a negative response. A client needs to be able to respond to all feedback, positive or negative. It’s surprising how many clients who perceive no real issue with their current service offering find out just what their own customers really think about them when they talk to a third party! Painful but necessary stuff.

And there you have it - hopefully an honest insight into how a particular customer perceives a product or service. Armed with this information, we can then set about interpreting just what this means for our client. But without this information, any strategy  development would remain a meaningless, academic exercise with very little chance of successful implementation in the real world. And that’s from our own research, not just a wild guess!

Setting the right price even in boom times is a hard enough task, but getting it right when times continue to be tough is even trickier. Many companies have reduced their prices over the past few months, offered discounts and further incentives to encourage their customers to buy. If the sales pipeline is still looking rather empty, now really is the time to take a long, hard look at your pricing strategy. Management consultants Accenture have produced a free report, which highlights the need for companies to outperform their competitors in a weak economy - and not just by continuing to drop prices. Instead, companies should take time to analyse their strategic focus by asking the following questions:

• Where in our product or service portfolio do we offer a significantly differentiated advantage? In other words, what do we do better than our competitors?
• Which services/products will still be essential for our customers when the dust settles after the economic downturn?
• Which services or products will most easily lead to sales of other goods or services?

In order to better manage the ongoing effects of this recession, focus on these products and the opportunities they provide. Aim to minimize the costs associated with promoting this product or service group and then, according to Accenture, price strategically around these products or services. As Marketing Consultants, it is this strategic approach to pricing which we find offers the best route to growth for our clients. A quick fix is just that - and will only bring limited results, compared to the more sustained impact of a strategic approach. Time and again we find that the key to developing a solid pricing strategy is to get the converation away from price and to focus on “value”, ensuring that your customers see the value you add above and beyond the products and services you provide. Once they understand the value you offer, it then becomes easier to lock customers in, whilst at the same time making it more difficult for them to suddenly switch when a slighly cheaper offering comes along.

There’s no getting away from the fact that it’s difficult to target the right set of potential customers with exactly the right offer, value proposition and, of course, price. The Internet now provides our customers with more information and more choices than ever. To be able to meet the challenges this brings means businesses need to continue to revisit and refine all elements of their marketing mix - including the thorny issue of price.  Take a look at Accenture’s free report here for further insight in how to get your pricing right - Accenture’s approach to pricing strategy

The Chartered Institute of Marketing in the UK has recently published a paper on the future of marketing and how it can deliver results for businesses in what is now a very different economic landscape than this time last year. They have interviewed a wide selection of business and market leaders across a whole spectrum of industry to find out just what role marketing has to play in the future. They have identified five drivers for growth which can achieve greater marketing and business performance. The first of these capabilities is “The customer centric organisation.” They point out that the days of simply talking about adopting a “customer-focussed” approach - without actually implementing it - are now well and truly over. In the past, many companies claimed to have their customer at the centre of their business - without really understanding what this meant and sometimes without any real understanding of their customers.

Gaining an understanding of your customers and ensuring that understanding permeates your organisation at every level is now key to driving future growth and achieving value. This sits firmly at the heart of how we do business here at Total Marketing Solutions. As marketing consultants, we always use the customer as our starting point for any strategy development. If we can achieve a clear understanding of our clients’ customers from the outset, we can then develop an appropriate strategy. Without putting the effort in at this early stage, we avoid the risk of basing our marketing strategy development on assumptions. This crucial customer research forms the first building block in our overall strategy development, enabling us to develop robust strategies capable of delivering growth and value for our clients. To find out how we make it all fit together, take a look at our approach for building a customer-centred marketing strategy here.

It’s been a while in the making but we are now ready to launch our new website. It’s taken us quite a while to get this far, lots of blood, sweat and tears - but we’re sure it will all be worthwhile now we’re live. To find out what all the fuss is about please visit the site and take a look around:- www.totalmarketingsolutions.co.uk

So how have we gone about it? We’ve literally followed our own advice - the advice we give our customers if a new website is one of the strategic recommendations we make following our usual rigorous review and audit of their business.

Step one, obvious though it seems, was to identify our business objectives for the site. It’s surprising how many companies decide they need a website “because everyone else has one”, without thinking about what they want it to do for them. Your objective might be to increase new customer account registration, it might be to increase the number of sales leads or enquiries generated. Whatever your objective/s, you can use your web analytics to measure any improvements and then tweak your website further if required. As strategic marketing consultants, our objective for our new website was to primarily increase the number of quality leads generated - we needed to make sure we clearly communicated how we work, with the emphasis on strategy development.

The next stage is to look at how customers will use the site and how their experience can be improved. Again, web analytics plays an important role here. You can look for potential problem areas like drop-offs and take steps to solve them. We found that whilst we had a significant number of visitors to our existing site, this didn’t translate into the number of enquiries we would expect. And a large number of enquiries were from companies looking for an advertising agency - our message was not as clear as it should have been. We want our new website to scream “marketing strategy development” from every page, whilst leaving potential customers looking for strategic help convinced we are the right company for them to do business with.

The final - and perhaps the most challenging  - stage, is to go through each page with a fine toothcomb, ensuring each one works as best as it can for you. We’ve taken a close look at each one of our existing pages, re-written or tweaked it, added new pages and content - it’s still a work in progress and the good thing about websites is that they are never cast in stone and are always a work in progress.  So what have we been looking at on each of our pages?

• We’ve stepped up the optimisation of the site, making sure all copy, titles and labels are able to improve our natural search results.
• We’ve also removed content that just wasn’t getting visited and focussed on improving the content on the key pages, making it easier for visitors to the site to get the information they need quickly.
• We’ve also used our web analytics to make sure we cover as many search terms as possible to avoid any “No results” keyword searches - so if you type in “marketing consultants”, you’ll find TMS at the top of the page. You’ll also find us under “marketing strategy consultants,” “marketing consultancy,” etc - you get the point! Don’t just think of the one search - try to think of as many different permutations of what you do and use web analytics to identify the main ones. Then build them into your site.
• We’ve also taken time to improve our home page - making sure we communicate our core messages quickly, whilst making it easier for visitors to find out the information they need in order to progress to an enquiry.
• We’ve also reduced the number of steps visitors have to take from our home page to begin key processes, like looking at case studies, finding our what we do and - of course - making an enquiry.
• We also hope that, having tweaked the layout, design and colours used on each page, this will improve click-thru rates and encourage visitors to visit more pages - in other words, to really get to know us and ultimately, gain a greater understanding of how we can help them.

Time will tell of course and rest assured that, as with any new website, we shall be monitoring our web analytics very closely after launch to see just how our new website is working for us.

With the onslaught of increasing noise over social media, the integrated marketing model has reared it’s head again. It keeps cropping up in marketing blogs and articles, but just what does it all mean??? One marketing blogger who has his finger on the pulse is John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing.

Like many other marketing professionals, John has noticed that marketing folks are now using “integrated marketing” to describe their ability to integrate traditional offline marketing with the new sexy social media. In our opinion, as marketing consultants, Integrated marketing is in fact the combination of marketing tactics to help deliver one marketing strategy to more quickly build know, like and trust amongst your customers.

In this sense then an integrated marketing approach is not a strategy, it’s the tactical delivery of a marketing strategy. That distinction is critical, because without the right strategy no amount of talk about integrating multiple platforms and mediums makes much sense. In fact, in many instances integration is simply interpreted as doing more kinds of stuff. The problem with more stuff is that stuff without a central strategy can actually cause one stuff to combat and conflict with some other stuff. The key is to strategically integrate - not just head off in various off- and on-line directions.

To find out more about what John has to say on this matter, go to his blog here.

The Holy Grail of how to accurately assess your Return on Investment for any marketing activities you choose to undertake has always been the sticking point for many marketers trying to justify spending their marketing budget. It’s been a rather hit and miss affair to date, particularly with the marketing waters being constantly muddied by new technologies and the different parameters they bring for measuring marketing effectiveness. Whilst the only real truth to date has been that it is crucial to carry out some measure of ROI, just how to do it has been hotly debated.

The Chartered Institute of Marketing has now produced a paper on measuring ROI, which we believe is well worth a look.The report looks at how marketing creates money and how to maximise your return on ideas, whilst achieving superior results from Finance and Marketing. The CIM has talked to over 100 organisations about what works for them and what doesn’t. They have then produced a framework to be used by any size of company to create a greater sustainable value. For those of you who are CIM members, you can find the paper in the Resource section of the CIM website.