When it's Time to Realign Your Marketing

People have no money. They’re feeling the pinch. No-one’s doing any business at the moment. No-one’s making purchasing decisions right now.

Is that so? Here are a few facts for you:

• Michael Jackson announces 10 concerts. They sell out instantly. He announces 10 more…and 10 more. They all sell out. Top ticket prices £1,000+


• Aston Martin launch and start to successfully sell bespoke £1.2m car


• Whitbread can’t physically can’t find enough land and build Premier Inn hotels fast enough to keep up with demand


• Domino’s Pizza & Mc Donald’s report large increases in profits
  Aldi, Morrison’s & Sainsbury’s profits up


• Sales of the Nintendo wii top 50m worldwide


• Gaming sector up


• Adult clothing and toys, erm, up


• Cinema advertising up


• British tourism up
• Business networking group 4Networking recording record membership levels

There are hundreds and thousands of other examples too.

Money is still around and growth is being achieved – you may just need to realign your business to succeed. You can realign by changing your market focus to the sectors that are enjoying growth. Realign by changing the message about your product. Realign by selling something new to your existing customers. Realign by taking your resources and employing them differently to solve a different problem. Realign by changing your position in the market.

Your realignment might at first look crazy – £1.2m car in a recession anybody? But the craziest thing you could do is to fail to realign with where the money’s being spent.

Sometimes You Get More than You Bargained For

I recently worked with a plumbing company – a very straight forward husband & wife team. (Marketing to many plumbers is an ad in the Yellow Pages and a name on the side of their van, so they had approached me with some trepidation). We worked on a localised mail campaign which addressed the real concerns of people looking for plumbers and I advised them to spend a little time and boot leather delivering the letters around their local area.

Yesterday was wet. Very wet. Yet undeterred, and armed with a couple of hundred envelopes, Mrs Smith (not a changed name, she really is Mrs Smith!) posted letters on four roads in the pouring rain before deciding that enough was enough and going home. When she got back she was astonished. She had four calls from customers waiting for her and through her letterbox she found a handwritten note which read:


'Many thanks for your circular. As a retired commercial director I must congratulate you on your efficient presentation of this excellent letter. I have put your sticker on the inside of my kitchen units and will most definitely be using you when the need arises.'


What do we learn here? That;

1, Getting marketing done professionally pays
2, The fundamental principles of profitable marketing are universal and recognisable
3, Adding something that engages the ‘might use you in the future’ group is a sure-fire winner
4, Don’t put things off because it’s raining (use that as a metaphor for recession if you will too)
5, Hand written notes have the power to touch people even more than four new customers

The Big Marketing Budget Mistake

Imagine your bank did this deal for you. For every £1 you give them, they give you £1.10. They then give you thirty days to pay your bit, too.

Now here’s the question. How much are you going to budget to spend with them?

Of course you’d be mad not to spend as much as you possibly could with them and to continually reinvest what you take out. Why would you put a budget on it?!

This is the madness of marketing budgets. If your marketing works – ie: it’s giving you a measured positive result – why would you do anything other than spend as much as possible on it? High growth companies of all sizes tend to get this and they become obsessed with working out customer lifetime values, how much they are happy to spend to acquire each new customer and then continually spending in the areas where they can be sure to get a positive return that they can measure.

Much of my work centres on getting business owners and directors to stop dreaming up and wasting budgets, and to start learning to find and actively maximise these calculated money makers. (When you consider I guarantee my fee for this work you realise how sure I am of the difference there is for you here). Good marketing is like your bank giving you £1.10 for every £1, not about sticking to budgets.

Accelerated Income from Marketing

What exactly does marketing give us?

The answer comes from the correlation between time and money. We can’t do anything about time of course; that moves at its own speed. But we can do something about the speed at which we can earn money. For example, think of an amount of money you would really like to earn this year. It would be obvious to say that earning the same amount of money but stretched out over the rest of your career is not going to be quite so appealing. But if we were to accelerate the processes needed to earn that amount so that we could do it in 10 months, or 6 months, or even less, then it suddenly all gets very interesting.

And that is what marketing is all about, achieving that acceleration, getting the results we want more and more quickly. Acceleration is a multiplication effect. In terms of physics it is the speed at which speed increases. In business it is a very simple formula:


(No of customers x No of transactions x Price) / Time = Income Acceleration


The sad thing is that without this information many businesses have no idea how to achieve better results. They become trapped in a consistent mentality of ‘having to advertise’ because it’s what they think they should do, or hoping that they get a referral somewhere but have no clear referral strategy. They compete predominantly on price because, well, isn’t that what all businesses do? And they will then tell you that that is what running a business is like.

Put that kind of thinking into the model above and you can clearly see why so many businesses struggle. I don’t want that for you, and I know without doubt that you’re aiming for more than that – you wouldn’t be reading this otherwise. Marketing is not something to be thought of in isolation. It’s not an academic subject to be dealt with on occasion by the management. It needs to be in the very heart and soul of your business, your people and the way you work.

Let’s just deal with advertising first of all. Advertising can be a way of bringing people into your business and as such it can be a part of your marketing mix. However it very often doesn’t work or it is relied upon on far too heavily by businesses. It certainly does nothing about the number of transactions you can do with each customer or price. Marketing encapsulates the whole acceleration formula.

Here’s a very simple strategy for accelerating your business success. It starts with your existing customers. Those people who, if you’re like 95% of other businesses out there, you ignore or don't treat as well as you should. They dealt with you once but now you’ve forgotten them. Even if your business revolves around repeat supplies you’re certain to have these poor ignored people who once were happy to do business with you. You need to get in the habit of speaking to them. Regularly. Write to them, email them, call them, send them a gift, make them a special offer, tell them about new products, invite them to events, ask them for a meeting, let them have a trial of something new, send them a hello, a thank you or some interesting information. Do whatever you need to do but do it and do it regularly. Every business can do this – I've known take away restaurants do it successfully!

In fact I have never known any business not to win additional sales from this technique and have seen some great relationships rekindle. Every business has an untapped source of wealth and profits in their customer base that they are just ignoring. Instead they are wasting money advertising for more people to deal with once and then ignore! It’s just madness but they can’t see it because that’s exactly what the next business is doing!

So that’s the ‘number of transactions’ part, but what else do we need to create some acceleration?
Here’s the killer punch that gives this strategy the accelerator. Ask for referrals while you do it. How easy is that?! When you are talking to customers always ensure that they are aware that referrals are important to you. If they have bought from you once and liked what you do, isn’t there a great chance that they will know somebody else who would benefit from what you do? Send out ‘family and friends’ vouchers or referral slips. This kind of thing works equally well in business to business circles and I have had some great results for clients in businesses such as IT and finance.

If your business is new or only has a small base you can still use this strategy. The size of your base doesn’t matter and even if it is absolutely zero, start by using the same principles with your old contacts – people who you have dealt with before in some capacity or other. Using this strategy you can achieve more sales from each customer and get them to introduce more customers who in turn can feed back into the same process. If you can also use some advanced strategies for increasing your prices you are well on your way to real accelerated growth. We’ll cover price strategies another time.

Of course this is the tip of the iceberg. There are many ways to pack all sorts of great marketing strategies into the acceleration formula. Remarketing your existing customers well is just one, but it is one of the quickest and most effective. And that, of course, is what acceleration in your business is all about.

Your Customers are Here

You have hundreds, possibly even thousands of customers out there who want to do business with you. They want what you’ve got to sell. They actively want to spend their money with you. Many of them might even love to be your customer for life. They have the potential to be a continual stream of income and profits for you.

But they don’t know about you yet. They are your missing customers.

There’s only one thing that’s going to link you up to your hundreds or even thousands of missing customers – and that’s great marketing. You probably have a very good product or service. Quite possibly, you have an outstanding product or service. Unfortunately though, that’s just not enough. You have to find a way to both find these missing customers and then make sure they truly, truly understand how they are going to benefit from doing business with you.

The good news is there are hundreds of ways for you to do this. They include dozens of forms of advertising, direct marketing, internet marketing, search engine advertising, email marketing, direct mail, telephone marketing, direct sales, public relations etc etc...

That’s why marketing should always be the most important thing in your business; it’s the engine that drives everything and will make you grow and prosper. It’s also why becoming good at marketing is the single most important step you can take to growing your business. Most often when a business fails it is because the people in it are poor at marketing. They might blame cash flow, recession, politics, war or anything else they can think of, but a fundamental lack marketing skills is often at the core. The ones that really understand this go on to become the success stories.

How many ways do you continually market your customers? What are the lifetime returns on this?

This blog aims to help you, challenge you and allow you to have a bit of fun along the way too.