Steps to Improve Marketing Results

Whenever I talk to a businessman or woman about their efforts to market their business I face the same old questions – “what are we doing wrong?” “We’ve tried advertising, websites, brochures, sales letters – but nothing seems to give us the response we need – what should we try next?”

It’s often difficult to advise them that actually they may well be doing the right things – but not actually executing them terribly well. And this often stems from the fact that we can all get far too close to our own businesses, making it difficult to put ourselves in the shoes of potential customers or clients. This is true whether you are selling a piece of software, accountancy services, or widgets. And if you cannot put yourselves in the shoes of your customer how can you respond to your marketing in the way a customer would and give an objective evaluation of what you are saying in your advertising and promotional materials? Here are a few suggestions of how you can review, and potentially improve your marketing efforts:

Objectively Review Your Marketing Materials
Take a close look at your marketing materials – your product literature, company brochure, advertisements, sales approach letters and your website, and try and read them as a client or prospect would. That’s often quickly and with a reasonable critical or cynical eye.

Ask yourself: What are we trying to achieve? And have we managed to get our message across in a clear and simple way? Ask - who should be reading this material? What will interest them? And make them want to read? Don’t forget that what interests you won’t necessarily interest your client or prospect.

Rewrite and Restructure Materials
If you do decide your literature falls short, and decide to rewrite, then follow some basic principles:

firstly be very clear who you are writing for – a consumer of business person? Are you writing for someone who is a technical expert or a novice? Will they be impressed by detailed product specification and product features, or by what the product or service actually delivers – in terms of the benefits? You’ve guessed it – you should be writing about advantages and benefits NOT features but this can be so difficult to do when you are really close to a product.
Think also about their motivations for buying and what will influence their choices – and don’t automatically think that price will be the key motivating factor. Quality, reliability and functionality will all come into play for product purchases and things like responsiveness, credibility and business style come into play when people are buying services.
Think through why they might read your literature and what they need to get out of it. Sometimes there’s a temptation to cover too much in an initial communication.
Understand at what stage in the sales process your prospect might read each individual piece and write it to meet that need.
Leave them in no doubt what you want them to do next - call in with their order, request a detailed brochure, look at your website for more details, whatever - but make sure you have made it crystal clear. I’ve lost count of the number of sales letters I get through that leave me wondering what I’m supposed to do now.

Consider Your Message

Have you created a consistent and easily recognisable company and/or product image? Is your logo correctly reproduced on stationary, literature, your website and adverts? This might seem irrelevant but it is all part of creating the right image of your company and helping prospects to recognise you, become familiar with you and as a consequence be more receptive to any approach you make to them.

Consider whether your message is consistent. Is it easy for people to know what you do and how you do it? Understand issues about quality and service levels? In a highly competitive business environment it’s the company with the clear and consistent message (which is carried through into produce or service delivery) that wins though. And if you don’t really have a message – how are clients and prospects going to distinguish you from all the other software companies, accountancy firms or widget manufacturers in the market.

The steps above should form part of your overall marketing planning process and of course you should have already clearly defined your target market and thought through how best to reach them – if not you could be spending your marketing budget in the wrong way and may never achieve the type of results you are looking for. For ideas and tips on How to Avoid Expensive Marketing Mistakes - click here.

Article written by Teresa Harris, Second Opinion Marketing. Teresa is an independent marketing consultant specialising in communication solutions and the customer experience. To contact Second Opinion Marketing call 01789 740396 or email tah@secondopinionmarketing.co.uk.

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