Total Marketing Solutions

One of the best parts of being a marketing consultant is that we meet people with bright ideas who are prepared to carry the idea through. Some years ago, Cathy Debenham despaired and bought a condensing gas boiler because, despite days of research, she couldn’t be sure whether the various biomass boilers that suppliers were trying to sell her were appropriate for her house; whether there was a stable supply of wood pellets, whether they could be delivered up her steep drive, or even whether biomass was even a sensible option. So she decided to do something about it - and built a business from scratch.

YouGen aims to build a community of people interested in renewable energy and low carbon living. This will include suppliers, people who’ve already revolutionised their energy use, and people who are thinking about it. The hope is that everyone will share expertise and help each other.

We’ve been working with Cathy over the last few months in order to help her build and implement YouGen’s marketing strategy, and it’s been a pleasure. It’s great to see that the site is now live and that we all now have easier access to information about renewables.

It might seem like a big ask, but now is the time to perk up and start to think about all the good things you could be doing to improve your market share and to drive sales - even in a downturn.

When everyone else is cutting budgets and panicking, marketing needs to act quickly to ensure future growth is achievable. Easier said than done, but as marketing strategy consultants, we are encouraging our clients to take a closer look at how they spend their business development and marketing budgets and to think about how they might do things differently.

For example, try focussing spend on tangible demand generation rather than brand-building. An overhaul of your approach to new business development will reap more measurable rewards at the moment rather than a corporate ad in an industry glossy. Or perhaps try focussing your sales efforts on individual accounts, particularly where your competitors may be weakening their grasp as they start to suffer from the effects of the recession.

If that’s too parochial, try just focussing on smaller market segments to achieve real market penetration.

As far as any weakening competitors are concerned, there may even be some who right now could be open to a merger or even acquisition. It’s a bold move but one that could pay real dividends when the market improves.

In terms of cost-free marketing activity, nothing can beat face-to-face contact with the senior people at your key customers. Whilst is does require time on your part, the value of sitting down with your key customers for a meaningful discussion on how you can work through the turbulent times together is immeasurable. Especially if your competitors are also doing their jobs and keeping an eye on any possible new business opportunities. You can use these interactions not just to build or shore up relationships, but also to glean valuable market information. And as the old saying goes, information is power.

Now really is the time to make sure that every last penny spent on marketing is well spent and is either increasing or shoring up your market share. That means choosing your marketing tactics carefully and measuring its effectiveness every step of the way.

When your hard-earned enquiry does come in, you obviously respond quickly with exactly the information your prospective customer needs to make the right decision. But despite your compelling argument, your proposal is rejected.

But why? Have you ever wondered? Have you ever asked? If not, you’re missing out on an opportunity to learn some valuable insights in how to move your business forward. But how do you go about asking? Many people find this is an uncomfortable situation to approach. It’s actually quite easy, if you handle it professionally.

Create a Form

Create a short form or questionnaire that lists a few questions you’d like the answers to. You may want to ask:

• if the proposal itself was clear
• whether all the information the prospect needed to make a decision was included
• did the proposal offer value for money
• whether your proposed product/service solution fitted their needs
• if any element was missing from your proposal

Resist he temptation to ask to see the winning proposal or ask which company won. These questions are too probing and could make your prospect feel uncomfortable.

Ask Permission

Ask your prospects for permission to send the questionnaire. This will give them the opportunity to refuse if they don’t care to participate.

Send the Form

Email works best in these situations – it gives your prospect time to think about the answers and what information to provide. Be prepared for some to head straight for the dustbin – but by keeping it short and by thanking them in advance for their insight and help in improving how you do business, you can minimize the temptation to bin your form.

While follow-up is usually a good thing, in this case it’s not advisable. If the prospect is too busy or simply changed his/her mind about responding, let it go.

Take time to learn from the feedback

When you get your responses, review them carefully. Don’t make radical adjustments based on one or two pieces of feedback. Instead, wait until you’ve collected several forms then look for trends. If you see that most prospects are making reference to the same things, you’ll know it’s time to make some changes.

We generally find that, as Strategic Marketing Consultants, by asking a few simple questions, you can find out an enormous amount of information that can help to turn losing proposals into winning ones - increasing your ROI from your marketing investment. While no one will win every project they bid on, with some “inside information” direct from your prospects, you’ll have a much better shot at creating winning in the future and  making sure that all your marketing activity generates as much value for money as possible.

With so many articles out there focussing on the doom and gloom of the current economic situation, it was refreshing to come across this article by John Quelch on the Harvard Business publishing site. He’s a welcome positive voice in encouraging businesses to start to plan for a brighter future, when it arrives. If you’re surviving the downturn and have made the necessary adjustments - possibly downsizing, definitely shedding unprofitable customers and almost certainly deleting poor selling products from your portfolio - then now if the time to plan ahead. In his article, John recommends a number of key strategies, which we - as Marketing Consultants - find echo the advice we are giving many of our customers.  He talks about the importance of customer focused marketing - focussing on high-potential customers and taking the time to fully appreciate how the downturn might have changed your relationship with your customers and how they want to buy from you in the future. If you feel like grasping hold of a bit of optimism then take a look at his article - it might just put a spring in your step!

Talking to many customers and by just simply looking around at what is going on in the market, it is clear that marketing budgets are under pressure as businesses look to control their costs. Whilst this is a perfectly sensible thing to do, the challenge is make sure that a rational approach to cost management is adopted and this is as true with marketing budgets as it is elsewhere within the organisation. The risk is that many companies simply adopt a ’slash and burn’ approach to cutting their marketing spend and accordingly take investment away from activity that is actually delivering a positive impact on revenues and profitability.

Whilst it may be wise to look to control costs, it is even more wise to do this in a ’scientific’ way and make sure that you keep spending on those areas of marketing activity that are giving you a return on investment.

Organisations that do this will achieve their objective of reducing marketing spend and at the same time reduce the risk of creating a self-inflicted down-turn in sales performance.

Of course a necessity for adopting such a rational approach to controlling costs is actually knowing the return on investment being delivered by the different marketing activities an organisation undertakes. This is particularly true with online marketing activity as this activity is generally very measurable and transparent.

Unfortunately we still find that many organisations do not actively measure the performance of all of their online marketing activity.  As digital marketing strategy consultants, we believe that, if they do not already do so, now is the time that organisations should be auditing their digital marketing activity to ensure they understand what is delivering the biggest impact and that they get the maximum possible return on their investment.

The following slides will walk you through how we approach this task on behalf of our clients…

Twitter - at first it’s fair to say no-one really got the point of Twitter. Do we really need more information, particularly if it’s only limited to providing a snapshot of what someone’s thinking at any one time? Or to be more precise, 140 characters worth of insight. Not much, you may think, but Twitter is now gaining favour as a unique way for businesses to provide increasingly choosy existing and potential consumers with a means to access information on products and services of interest to them. Businesses are now using Twitter as a marketing communications tactic to not only develop and promote their brand, they are using it to interact with their customer base. What’s more, it can be a powerful way to drive further traffic to your website. Tweet about your recent blog or some interesting resources recently added to your website and, if it’s interesting to your Twitter audience, their visits to your site will not only help boost your SEO rankings but they may also start tweeting about it on their own. We’re still looking at how best to use Twitter ourselves and have found some great information on http://www.hubspot.com/twitter-for-marketing/ - Take a look - you may be tweeting sooner than you think!

I came across this Small Business Year-End Marketing Checklist on Search Engine Land and thought is was worth sharing. Then I had second thoughts, and thought that I could do better, and make the checklist more relevant to the UK. So here goes:

1. Claim your Google Maps listing

Go to Google Maps and search for yourself (such as by business name and city name). If your business is there, click the EDIT link, and then click CLAIM YOUR BUSINESS. If you’re not listed, use the Google Local Business Center and follow the directions to add your business.

2. Do the same at Yahoo Local and Microsoft Live Search Maps

The steps are pretty similar. Search for your business on Yahoo Local and Microsoft Live Search Maps. Yahoo specifically asks, “Own this business?” with a link to claim it. Live Search has a link that says “Change Your Business Listing.”

Extra Credit: Claim or cleanup your local listings on Yell.com; the free listing is generally adequate.

3. Claim your social media name/profiles

You may not be active in social media right now, but chances are good that you will be at some point. When you do, you’ll want to make sure you own your own profile on the important social media sites. With that in mind, create accounts for your business — using your company name — on sites like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and MySpace. Complete the profiles and be sure to link to your primary web site when possible. Even if you never use these social media profiles, at least you’ll know that no one else will be using your name.

4. Do basic online reputation management

What other people say about you online matters a lot. Bad business or product reviews can spread quickly, hurting your bottom line. At minimum, use Google Alerts to keep track of what people are saying. Use it to monitor your company name, your own name, and the names of important people in your company. Choose the “Comprehensive” alerts and get alerts at least once a day.

Extra Credit: Learn how to use RSS, and subscribe to RSS feeds of your company name and important staff names. These make an excellent supplement to what you’ll get from Google Alerts.

5. Get involved with your analytics

Don’t have web analytics? Google Analytics is more than adequate for many small businesses, and it’s free. Once you have analytics installed, pay attention to what the data tells you. Look at what keywords are sending natural search traffic to your site. Look at what other sites are referring traffic to you. There are usually new marketing opportunities to be found in both of those data sets.

6. Make sure that your Sitemap is up to date and registered at Google Webmaster Tools. It’s free and helps search engine spiders to index pages and tell them things that the site doesn’t, like how often the site is updated.

7. If you sell products, make sure you’re registered on Google Base. Formerly know as Froogle, it’s a cross between an online shop and a price comparison site with two features things that set it apart: it’s free, and the results appear on the Google search results page.

Try typing ‘trainers’ into Google and you’ll probably see ‘Shopping results for trainers’ with 3 direct links to trainers. These are selected results from the product search. The results are a little like Google’s search results - you don’t pay to be here and you can’t buy your way in. But if you’re not submitting your product file, you can’t be here. I have a client in a niche market who can get up to 12% of their sales from Product Search - for free.

So if you’ve got an ecommerce web site, you should be on Google Product Search. Register at Google Base and upload your product file. It could be your shortcut to the top of the Google search results page!

8. Review the title tags on all your pages. What is the title tag? It’s a few words of text that probably appear in the top right hand corner of your browser, especially if you’re using Internet Explorer. Look at the BBC home page - the title is “BBC homepage.” Similarly, the title of the Marks and Spencer homepage is just “Marks and Spencer.” For both of these iconic brands, home page titles don’t count for a lot.

Look instead at the Next site. The title tag here is “Next - Women’s & Men’s Fashion, Children’s Clothes, Homeware & Electricals” telling the search engines exactly what Next does. Type “Women’s Fashion” into Google and Next is on the first page. Where’s Marks & Spencer? Not on the first 10 pages yet it’s probably the UK’s leading retailer of Women’s fashion.

When it comes to Search Engine Optimisation, there are few things as important as the title tag.

So thanks to Search Engine Land for getting me thinking, and here’s hoping that 2009 is a good year for small business and marketing consultants alike!

Like a London bus, you wait ages for blog posts from Total Marketing Solutions and then 2 come along in a day!

I came across some statistics today that put some substance behind the oft heard claim that companies who continue to invest in marketing throughout a downturn out perform those that don’t. I myself am quick to use this argument although I confess to always being a little uncomfortable in saying it without some hard facts to back up the statement as I fear that it can come across as self-serving - i.e “as a marketing consultant he would say that wouldn’t he?”

Anyway today I read some of these hard facts on the Go-To-Market Strategies website - apparently the facts reveal that in past recessions, companies who continued to aggressively market themselves realized an average sales growth of 275 percent over the next five years, versus a 19 percent growth rate of those who significantly cut marketing expenses. If the past is any predictor of the future then these figures speak for themselves.

As we are currently advising our clients as marketing consultants, the trick is to make sure that your continued strategic marketing investment is very well targeted and focused on delivering a demonstrable return on investment.

It seems that you can’t avoid emails or blog posts on how to survive in a downturn at the moment. Now I’m a positive person so all this ‘noise’ on this subject to me can come across as just more negative sentiment that is having the effect of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. I am a realist so I am not denying that it is tough out there but there is opportunity as well as threat so I believe that you must stay positive particularly if you believe in your business and you have a strong value proposition that adds real value for your customers. Anyway on the subject of these articles and blog posts I do take time to read quite a few of them and when I see something that makes sense or resonates with me I’ll let you know.

One such blog post dropped into my inbox this morning from Geoffrey James, see  http://blogs.bnet.com/salesmachine/?p=616&tag=nl.e808 Now it is an American post so all you cynical Brits approach with caution but there are some real nuggets in there. The 2 things that I most strongly agree with are (1) Be aggressive, now is not the time to ‘hunker down’ and (2) Get you boss out in front of customers - who better to ’sell’ than the company owner?

If I see more posts that make sense to me as a strategic marketing consultant trying to help business owners and managers then I’ll sign post them for you here.

Following on from the previous post (Time for marketing to drive growth?) which shows that marketing becomes even more important in difficult times, it’s interesting to see how businesses are reacting in different ways. Marks & Spencer have announced that they’re cutting their marketing spend by 20% following a huge drop in profits. Elsewhere it appears that many companies are shifting the focus of their marketing even if budgets aren’t being cut; according to this report by Gyro International, 83% of Marketing Directors are focusing on their current customers more than ever in the weaker economic climate and 51% are focusing on loyalty marketing.

Now this might seem like common sense - it’s a lots less risky to invest in marketing to customers who have already bought from you that to attempt to acquire new customers - but for many the ‘glamour’ of marketing is in the exciting advertising campaigns that they often generate.

It looks to me that what Marks and Spencer are actually announcing a cut in their advertising spend; we will surely find that the opportunities that Sir Stuart Rose is talking about - such as growing M&S Direct and investing in international business - will lead to increases in marketing in these areas.

One of the never-ending jobs of a marketing consultant is to reassure clients that marketing is more that just advertising. Given that so many marketing directors are investing in customer marketing and loyalty marketing, the message is clearly getting through to business. All that’s left is to get through to the headline writers.