Your 2016 marketing strategy: 12 questions to ask yourself

By Nigel TempleNo Comments
What is your 2016 marketing strategy? Here are 12 questions to ask yourself: 1.  What is your offer to the marketplace? (This should be a simple sentence or two that anyone can understand). 2.  What is the one key thing that you want customers to remember about your brand, next year? 3.  Are you going to launch any new products / services in 2o16? (Hint: you can't keep selling the same old stuff forever, can you?) 4.  Have you reviewed your pricing, for the year ahead? Should it go up, stay the same, or go down? 5.  What is your digital marketing strategy for 2016? 6.  What is your mobile marketing strategy for the year ahead? 7.  How will you out-innovate your competitors, with regards to marketing, in the New Year? 8.  Who is going to do the webcopywriting?  ("The more you write, the more you sell.") Remember that writing for the web is different to writing for print. 9.  Which social media platforms will you focus on, and why? 10....
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Marketing metrics and measurement

By Nigel TempleNo Comments
As the management guru Peter Drucker said: "What gets measured, gets done." How do you know what's working and what isn't - if you don't measure outputs and response rates? Here are some of the things you can think about, with regards to marketing metrics and measurement: OUTPUTS Set targets for of all your 'marketing outputs', i.e. * Blog posts * Newsletter * Press releases * Social media connections * Talks given * Networking events attended WEBSITE * Total number of indexed pages * Unique Visitors * Bounce rate * Page impressions * Popular times of day to visit your website * Average time spent on site * Page views * Referral traffic (i.e. traffic arriving from other websites such as Facebook or Twitter) * Backlinks * Number of downloads (of, say, guides) NEWSLETTER * Subscribers, open rates, click through rates, hard bounce rates (i.e. dead email address), soft bounce rates (temporarily unavailable), spam complaints, unsubscribes SOCIAL MEDIA * Social media reach * Twitter Followers, ReTweets and other mentions * Facebook connections, Likes and Follows * LinkedIn connections, conversations, meetings MEDIA RELATIONS * Number of media contacts * Number of...
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Marketing strategy and plan

By Nigel TempleNo Comments
Do you have a clear marketing strategy and plan for the year ahead? Have you chosen your market segments, decided which products / services to focus on and costed your promotional mix (in terms of both time and money)?  Marketing is too important to leave to chance. This is the perfect time to think about the big picture and your key objectives. Key issues include market segments, how to stand out from the crowd and key messages. In other words - who are you are going to market to, how will you differentiate your business and what do you want prospective customers to remember about you? Time and money are limited. You can't sell to everyone. Smart enterprises focus on clearly defined groups of people with shared needs. They communicate with them consistently. Remember that 'little and often' beats 'big and infrequent' when it comes to communication. It is important to have a written marketing plan. This is good discipline as it will...
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How to get more clients

By Ben TempleNo Comments
How to get more clients is a question that we are often asked. Here is a seven step process: 1. Who are your ideal clients? You should be able to answer this question instantly. Within your marketing plan, write descriptions of your chosen market segments (groups of people with shared needs). It's all too easy to try to sell to everyone you come into contact with. Smart businesses decide who they wish to serve and they channel their time, money and resources into communicating with target market segments. 2. Use a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system in order to keep track of dormant, current and prospective clients. The busier you get, the more complex this process becomes. 3. Use a customer education approach as this will bring people to you. Provide useful, helpful, interesting and up-to-date information and package it in helpful ways. 4. Increase your promotional mix. Most businesses don't use enough promotional techniques. The Marketing Compass has researched several hundred promotional options...
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What is your main marketing challenge?

By Nigel TempleNo Comments
Hello. What is your main #marketing challenge, from this list? If you had to pick just one - what would it be? * Is it lack of awareness? * Is your visual brand identity out of date? * Have the sales enquiries stopped arriving? * Or have your customers stopped buying? * Do you find writing a challenge? * Does your website let you down? * Is your marketing plan up-to-date? * Does your marketplace understand what you do? * Are you too busy to get the marketing done? * Is social media driving you insane? * Do you wonder where to spend your time? * Is your marketing budget delivering a poor ROI? * Is your competition always one step ahead? * Do you have a clear marketing strategy? * Are you measuring your marketing results? * Is it something else entirely? Have you got a marketing challenge? The Marketing Compass is here to help. We provide independent professionals and small business owners with marketing guidance. You are welcome to ask us questions about any aspect of...
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The marketing commitments – a 7 point checklist

By Nigel TempleNo Comments
It order to attract new customers, you are going to have to either spend money or time, or a combination of both. When I ask my seminar audiences to choose, they overwhelmingly opt for spending their time. So the question is: where should you spend your time, when it comes to marketing your small business? Here is 'The marketing commitments' a 7 point checklist, which may help you to decide: 1. Start with your marketing plan   Otherwise you are shooting in the dark. If you don't have one, spend half a day (i.e. a Saturday morning) writing one. Refer to your marketing plan once a week, preferably on a Friday for 20 minutes - so that you can plan activities for the following week. (See Navigator membership of The Marketing Compass). 2. Spend at least half an hour every morning writing   Believe me, if you do this, you will get better and faster. I recommend that you write a blog every day * gasp...
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How to influence people and attract more customers

By Nigel TempleNo Comments
Whatever you push against in life tends to push back against you. The alternative approach is to bring people, resources and customers to you, using the power of influence. The direct approach can appear to be the best option. Which is why so many businesses still cold call prospective customers. I was talking to a business owner yesterday and I asked her how she attracted new clients. "I pick up the phone and try to get a meeting," she said. "OK," I replied, "who are you calling?" "I usually work my way through a directory," she responded. Oh dear, I thought. She must be able to handle a considerable amount of rejection. The challenge with this approach is that she is starting without any relationship at all, with the person she is trying to get through to. Therefore, this is an extreme example of 'push marketing'. Another example would be the knock at your front door in the evening, from someone representing...
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Marketing systems and processes – the key to success

By Nigel TempleNo Comments
Do you cast your marketing messages into the void and wait for an echo? Are you constantly looking for new business and ignoring dormant customers? Do you have a written marketing plan, including a promotional mix schedule for the year ahead? Do you keep all of your contacts in one place? Do you have a system for following up every sales lead and opportunity? It's easy to go networking, attract a few followers on the social networks, send out the occasional newsletter and respond to random referrals. We can all keep busy throughout the day. Frenetic activity can become reassuringly addictive. It takes discipline to follow procedures and systems. To a large extent, this approach is dull and boring. But it works. Time and time again I meet brilliant people who are following their own star. They are multi-talented, original thinkers. They are also as poor as a church mouse. They don't like to be constrained by boring systems. They don't believe in sales or marketing processes. I also...
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Marketing is like playing chess

By Nigel TempleNo Comments
When you receive a new sales enquiry or make a sale to a new customer, the chances are that they didn't hear about you from one source. Typically, it goes something like this: A) Someone arrives on your website. B) They join your newsletter list. C) They receive your newsletters and open a few of them. D) Months go by, during which they follow you on Twitter and read one or two or your blog posts. E) They revisit your website to see what you are up to. F) Finally, they have a requirement that you can help with and they send you an email or make a purchase via your website. Exhausting, isn't it? Many people simply give up, because 'my marketing isn't working'. During my marketing seminars, I am often asked which promotional techniques are the most effective. Bearing in mind that I only work with independent professionals and small business owners (who don't have marketing budgets), my initial...
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Small business marketing strategy

By Nigel TempleNo Comments
Here's a short story about small business marketing strategy... David (not his real name) was a client of mine, a few years ago. He was a left brain thinker. An engineer by training, he liked a structured approach, logical steps and processes. He worked endlessly on his marketing plan and talked about the detailed elements of his website and promotional mix. He was never in a rush and preferred to think everything through carefully. Stephanie (not her real name) was another client. She was chaotic to work with, never wrote anything down and was always moving onto the next great thing in marketing. She didn't like plans and used to say to me: "What's the point of plans? They never work out anyway and they take so much time. Let's get out there and DO SOMETHING!" Stephanie liked to talk about the 'big picture'. She felt that the greater the number of playing cards you throw up in the air, the greater...
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