July 1 often heralds a time to reflect on your business achievements over the past financial year. Have you grown? Gone backwards? Or are you treading water?
When the economy is growing fast, it’s easy to succeed without much attention to marketing. However, the economic future today isn’t looking rosy.
What do many businesses do when there’s a downturn? They try to lower their costs of course. In theory this is fine, but often the first thing to be cut is marketing, particularly advertising and promotion and that’s a great way to ensure your sales go down!
So, how do you develop effective marketing strategies to sustain you during these times?
1. Start with a marketing plan
Small and medium businesses often see the development of a marketing plan as a waste of time and energy. They rush into the implementation of their ideas in an effort to be “doing something” often wasting more time and money communicating with prospects that don’t have a need for their service or product or are not as profitable.
2. Analyse your market
Your market is the overall industry in which you compete. You need to analyse your market so you can gain an understanding of your business’s full market potential and identify new areas of opportunity.
Ask yourself:
· Is my market growing or declining and why?
· Which segment of my market is most advantageous for my business to compete in?
· Which factors are changing my market (e.g. seasonality/trends) and how will they affect the future of my business?
3. Know your competition
Thoroughly investigate your competition. Find out their strengths and weaknesses and how they compare to yours. Write their marketing plan. This will give you the intelligence to anticipate their moves and pre-empt them.
4. Focus on the customer
Effective marketing strategies begin and end with the customer. Ensure you maintain existing customer relationships. It costs far less to conduct business with an existing customer than to attract new ones. Develop a profile of your most profitable customers. Know their needs, business pains and media habits. You can then use this profile to attract new customers and communicate with them more effectively.
5. Perform a SWOT analysis on your business
Assess your strengths and weaknesses from your customer’s point of view. Then look at the opportunities and threats - those things outside your control that will have an impact on your business. From this analysis develop a list of key issues that need to be addressed.
6. Identify your key points of difference
Do you have a compelling customer value proposition? You can gain a competitive edge in your market by knowing and communicating your key point of difference to your target market. Ask yourself, “What do I offer that makes me unique?”
7. Set realistic objectives
Be realistic about what you need to accomplish and how long it will take. Your marketing objectives should be relevant to your current marketing and business issues and move you towards achieving your financial goals.
8. Think geometrically
The best way to grow your business is geometrically – by enlarging the size of each transaction, engaging in more transactions per cycle with each customer, tapping into the enormous referral power of each customer and of course, getting new customers through traditional avenues. By focusing on all four directions at once your business will grow.
9. Track and measure your marketing
Measuring your marketing tactics will save you valuable time and money. A simple way is to ask every customer. “How did you hear about us”?
10. Learn from your experiences
Continually speak to your customers, research your competitors and analyse your business and market to ensure you are taking advantage of all opportunities available. If something doesn’t work – don’t be put off – chances are you will know what went wrong and why, so your marketing activities will only become more effective and improve your business results year after year.
Very helpful outline thank you for sharing.
ReplyDelete