Total Marketing Solutions

As one of many SME’s located in the South West of England, we’re flabbergasted by the Government’s decision to halt the planned roll-out of next gen broadband across  Cornwall. Whilst we ourselves are lucky enough to have reasonable broadband capacity at the moment, sufficient enough at least to help us deal successfully with clients throughout the UK, like many other businesses in the region we were looking forward to broadband speeds of up to 100mb to enable us to better use the web as a business enabling tool.

It’s all the more frustrating that the plug has been pulled because this is a project which could undoubtedly create jobs and wealth in the south west region and help achieve the government’s ambition of rebalancing the economy away from an over-reliance on the public sector.

So here we have a unique situation in one of the most deprived areas of Europe, where small businesses have fought hard to overcome any geographical hurdles to be able to compete on a wider stage beyond the Tamar but where the new Government sees fit to halt access to vital next generation broadband. A real case of cutting your nose off to spite your face.

Now that all the hoopla has subsided it’s time for our new coalition government to get on with the job in hand - and what a job it is. Of the many cabinet appointments announced during the last 24 hours, one of the most interesting to us was that of Vince Cable. As a small business ourselves, and with our customer base ranging from small start-ups to European organisations with a turnover of £20m, we’re extremely interested to hear what our new Business Secretary Mr. Cable has to say for himself. He once described himself as a friend to business, but a “critcial friend.” What this will mean for small to medium-sized businesses across the country is as yet unclear, but his appointment seems to have been thus far met with widespread approval. Apart from the financial sector of course, where one financier was quoted in the Independent this morning as saying that, if Cable’s plans for bank regulation are adopted, it’ll be time to send for the men in white coats!

It’s a staggering statistic but on average  1- 5% of customers account for up to 40% of company revenue. It’s even more staggering when these companies confess to being unsure about who their top - i.e. most profitable - customers are. Our consultant Rennie Gould has seen this problem surface many times with clients who were struggling to maximise their profitability because their marketing strategy failed to focus on their profitable customers. He’s delivering a marketing masterclass in Kuala Lumpur at the end of May to highlight this issue for delegates from across Asia. He’ll focus on customer importance and profitability - placing them at centre stage when it comes to developing a marketing strategy which will deliver real profit. We’ll post more information on the masterclass shortly - in the meantime you can visit the organisers UNI here.

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.

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.

It’s always interesting and enlightening to work with clients who have a strong, well thought-through and well-articulated sales proposition - those who have thought through their product offering and value proposition carefully, who have a profound understanding of what their customers want and who know what their competitors are up to. Unfortunately our experience of working as marketing strategy consultants shows us that these companies are the exception rather than the rule.

Now more than ever it’s absolutely imperative that, before embarking on any kind of marketing or business development activity, companies have a clear idea of how they are going to successfully compete. As marketing consultants we often encounter companies who have decided on a new website for example, without really thinking about the bigger picture - i.e. what is the target audience for that website or what the key selling messages are that they want the website to convey. It is critical to clearly understand your sales proposition before deciding on which direction to take to promote your business. Developing a compelling proposition to take to market revolves around answering three simple questions:-

1. What business problem are you looking to solve?
2. Why should your prospective clients choose you above your competitors?
3. Can you deliver on your promises?

But be warned: an overly simple answer to any of these questions will not be compelling enough to convince new companies, previously unaware of your existence, to start doing business with you.

In our experience, to build a strong case you need to be able to demonstrate the Return on Investment (ROI) and value added that you can deliver for your potential customers. In other words, clearly demonstrate what extra your customers could gain from paying for your product or services. Demonstrating ROI isn’t rocket science, but it can be a grey area where many companies fail to identify the real benefits that they deliver to their customers. The key is to get your potential customers to focus on the return bit of the equation, rather than the initial investment of buying from you. And with more and more companies having to justify every last penny spent at the moment, you need to be able to demonstrate the strength of your own proposition before chasing down the all too rare new business development opportunities.

More than ever, companies are coming under pressure to negotiate on price, to give the best deal possible, a “credit crunch special.” There are numerous tried and tested strategies for dealing with the all-too common obstacle of price, with the general consensus being to steer your potential customer away from price towards a discussion about value. But here’s the rub: it’s a lot more difficult than it sounds.

As strategic marketing consultants, we find that a many companies struggle to correctly identify a value proposition which will be sufficiently appealing to their buyer. What your customers value and what they are actually prepared to pay for it are often different. The question is: how to bridge this gap. We help our own customers to correctly identify just what their customers consider to be value for money by carrying out detailed research amongst their key targets. Only with an understanding of what it important to the end customer can you really start to create a valid value proposition which will be credible and resonate amongst your target market. Time spent on developing a credible proposition will save time further down the line and hopefully avoid any protracted discussions around price. What’s more, it’s same to assume that most customers already believe they are purchasing something of value and are willing to pay for something as a “fair equivalent” for their money. But what they are really looking for is “value-added”, in other words “good value”.

Whatever the price point you set, your customers need to believe that that what they are buying is actually worth more to them than what they are paying. In other words, when you come to define - or indeed, redefine - your value proposition, try to find things you can offer to add exclusive yet highly relevant value - all included in your very reasonable price! Once you have done this, you need to make sure you communicate these elements to your customers to further reinforce your value proposition.

By taking  the time to think about just what your customers value and how you can build that into your proposition, you can protect your pricing, stave of competitors and keep your customers coming back for more!