The Secrets of Successful Marketing

What do you think are the secrets of good marketing?

Good advertising? Effective press releases? Quality brochures? Targeted direct mail? Special offers? Great products? A good website?

Well maybe… but without the secrets I’m going to share in this article all of these things can fail.

So what are the real secrets of successful marketing?

Well I believe there are 6 secrets and they apply whatever your product or service and whichever industry or service sector you operate in. They apply for large and small companies alike and if you learn the secrets and apply them to your marketing activities you can reap the rewards.

Secret No. 1 – Know Your Audience

In marketing speak this is all about identifying your target market and segmenting that market until you identify a group of like minded individuals or organisations that share common characteristics. For example in the car market a simple segmentation might identify the following segments:

Family users - looking for seating capacity, boot space, price, fuel economy and safety
Run around users – where fuel economy, small size will be important
Business and executive users – for whom appearance, reliability and status could be critical

In real terms this is all about getting a really good understanding of the market for your product and identifying the characteristics of the people or businesses in that market.

Ask yourself some questions and consider things like:

What are their needs and wants? Make sure you know what these are by asking people in your target market – don’t make assumptions.
What are their priorities? So going back to the car example – although the family car buyer might want status and appearance when you knuckle down to things these factors are often outweighed by the practical points of how many passengers the vehicle will comfortably seat and the price bracket they are trying to buy within.
In the business to business market it’s important to get under the skin of what the personal (as well as the business) priorities are of the buyer. If someone’s in line for promotion you might be able to deliver a good solution that they can take credit for or offer added value services which allows them to impress their bosses.
What external factors affect your target market? How do changes in the economy, interest rate changes and the performance of international markets affect your target market? If you don’t know you could be making all kinds of mistakes in your marketing – and wasting a lot of money. What social and environmental factors impact on your customers and prospects? How ‘green’ and socially aware are they – will they respond well to a product or service because it’s something they can ‘believe in’ or think is better for them? You only have to think about the growth in sales of organic food stuffs and cosmetic products that are not tested on animals to see that there is a market out there with people who are willing to pay a premium for products that satisfy this sort of requirement.
What do they read and who or what influences them? If you can understand these things you will have a much better idea of where you should be advertising and the type of marketing message that will appeal to them.
How do they respond to different sales and marketing approaches? For example if you are targeting busy managers and you are trying to use direct mail or telemarketing – will you actually reach the decision maker or will the mail or call be filtered by a secretary. If this is the case you need to really understand your target so that you can make an approach with an offer they can’t refuse. So – sticking to the car example – if you are a car dealer trying to speak to executives about a new model you are launching, your approach would need to focus on the factors we mentioned above but also bear in mind their busy schedule – so you might call or write to offer to bring a car around to show them so that they can see whether they would like to have one for the weekend for free – to test the product for themselves.
In the business to business environment you also need to think about the type of organisations that you are targeting – their size, their structure and their decision making processes. You can waste a lot of effort in promotion and marketing activity targeting people who don’t ultimately hold the purse strings, unless you know this secret.

Secret No. 2 – Credibility and Clear Messages

In the marketing text books this might come under a heading of branding. To be successful your company needs to be known for what you do. And the only way to achieve this is to do what you do well and to create a simple and often repeated message about what you do which explains things clearly to prospective customers.

How well known is your company in the market in which it operates? Do you leverage this awareness fully or do you need to build more awareness?

Of course to answer this point properly you will need to have decided (quite precisely) which market segments you are operating in. The other thing to bear in mind here is that you may have a biased view of how well people know your business and its products – so ask them – or get an independent evaluation. Many larger companies can afford customer awareness surveys to provide them with a very clear picture of market awareness but for smaller businesses this may not be cost effective. A better approach is to get the team to ask some critical questions of customers and people they come into contact with. Ask your customers how well they feel they know you and whether they are aware of your full range of products. Ask suppliers the same thing but also ask them whether other people they meet have heard of you. You’ll be amazed what you can learn just by asking a few direct questions and listening with an uncritical ear to the response. Don’t get too sensitive if you don’t hear exactly what you were hoping to hear – instead use the information to develop a plan to change awareness or the impressions that people have.

Going back to your customers – what do they really think of you – if they were to describe your business and its products or services to someone else what would they say? And would you be satisfied with this? Do you need to change their perception – perhaps by improved communication – or sometimes it will mean a change in the way you do things.

Do you know what gives you credibility? Is it the type of companies and organisations that you work for? Being able to quote household names in a list of clients might impress some people but equally a list of well know local companies could be just as effective depending on the market in which you operate. It might be testimonials from past clients or customers or it may be as simple as name awareness and reputation. Why do second hand car salesmen and double glazing salesmen have such a bad name for themselves? It’s all about credibility – because of their reputation for wheeler dealing we don’t tend to trust them – and we don’t buy from people we don’t trust. Of course credibility can be damaged all too easily – by product failures, inappropriate or badly timed marketing activity or the poor performance of your staff.

If you have a strong, clear and easily understood message and you repeat that message often and on everything that you produce, it should be easier for you to build awareness and reinforce credibility.

Secret No. 3 – Care for your customers

The first thing to realise with this secret is that I don’t just mean the shallow habits of saying have a nice day or enjoy your meal – or the classic mistake of having a poorly managed customer service department to deal with customer issues, problems and enquiries. In my experiences customer care departments do everything but care for the customer – starting with the ‘press 1 for customer care’ and right through to the crass letter they send you telling you they take your complaint very seriously but in real terms they are going to do absolutely nothing about it.

I mean valuing customers and developing a relationship where you get more from them and they feel they’re getting more from you. This can mean a big investment in your time and in marketing spend and it isn’t always easy – so why bother?

Well firstly you will all be aware of the costs involved in attracting a new customer – and you should know this cost precisely for your business. It’s not difficult to calculate – how much do you spend per annum on advertising, website, direct mail, sales people – and how many enquiries do you get? How many of these convert into customers? It may only be an estimation but once you start to think about this in hard cash you start to realise why you can earn more by selling additional products or services to your existing customers. It can cost anywhere between 2 and 10 times as much to attract a new customer as it does to sell more to an existing one. This secret alone could save you hundreds if not thousands of pounds.

The idea of caring for your customers has been around a long time however and I’d forgive you all for saying – so tell us something we don’t know. Well hopefully I can. My reason for suggesting you ‘care for your customers’ – is simply this – that if your customers are satisfied with the service they receive from you they are more likely to recommend you to someone else – and this is becoming increasingly important in consumer and business to business markets.

Research at the end of 2000 looked at how people’s propensity to recommend and buy as a result of recommendation has changed in the last few years.

In 1997 78% of people said they would recommend a company they liked to others. By 2000 90% of people were saying this.

In 1999 60% of people would buy a product based on recommendation. By 2000 this figure had risen to 76%.

These are dramatic increases and with this evidence suggesting that more people are willing to recommend and the proportion of people buying on the strength of recommendation is on the increase, you need to be in a position to take advantage of this.

You’ve only got to look at the big advertisers to realise that they’ve know this for some time – that’s why household names are used to sell cars, sports clothing, even a well known brand of crisps. But think also about your own buying behaviour – whether in business or as a consumer. If you’re about to invest in a new computer system or change your telecommunications supplier do you ask around – to see who everyone else is using and check whether they are happy with the service they receive? If you are in the market for a new car or mobile phone – don’t you make a beeline for people with the model you are looking at so that you can check out their experience of the product?

Of course you do and consumers and buyers everywhere are becoming increasingly reliant on third party recommendation and endorsement to help them with their decision making.

Why is this? Well in my view it has a lot to do with the fact that consumers are becoming far more marketing savvy and this is down to exposure to marketing messages. The average consumer is exposed to somewhere in the region of 1,500 advertising messages per day. In America the email SPAM epidemic is believed to be seriously interfering with productivity – in spite of the fact that Microsoft blocks 2.4 billion pieces of junk mail per day. And consumers are so used to receiving junk mail (by that I mean untargeted mail of no interest to them – as opposed to direct mail – ie a piece of mail which is targeted to reach them with a message they are interested in) that one third of all mail is now thrown away without being opened and 60% without being read.

The challenge you have, if you use traditional advertising methods, is to get cut-through. My view is that by caring for your customers – and by that I mean delivering a good product or service, keeping in touch and offering new, relevant products and dealing with any problems or difficulties quickly and efficiently – you put yourself in a strong position – firstly to get repeat business from those customers but secondly to develop your customers as advocates for your business – people who will recommend others to you proactively so that you can benefit from the earlier mentioned increase in buying based on recommendations.

Secret No. 4 – Making buying easy.

In today’s internet enabled, consumer empowered age this means removing any barriers that might exist to getting a sale. And this can be anything from – having receptionists handling sales calls to salesmen not being able to negotiate on price or not being able to feedback and liaise with the product development teams.

Let me explain.

Handling sales calls. Using your main receptionist to handle sales calls might seem like the obvious approach for your business – but if sales enquiries are complex and the receptionist is likely to need to hand over the call to someone else then you might be getting off on the wrong foot with a prospective client. You can tackle this problem in a number of ways – perhaps you can afford to have a dedicated sales line – which can be staffed by a sales person. Or more likely you can train your reception staff to handle sales calls effectively. Minimise the amount of information the caller needs to give your receptionist before they get through to the sales team, clarify the type of enquiries you are happy for your receptionist to deal with and perhaps even give them a little bit of product knowledge and sales training so that they don’t loose any potential sales. Do be careful how you use technology at this stage in the buying process. Using call waiting or automated telephone systems on sales lines can be frustrating, unless they work properly.

Don’t underestimate the need for this simple step. I was recently looking to find a printing company who could do a fairly simple print job for me. I called four companies – and only one of them was able to provide the information I needed and handled my enquiry in a way that made me want to do business with them. Now in that case the job was only small – but there will certainly be more work in the future – and the three who failed to make it easy for me to buy (one because they didn’t return my call quickly, another because the person I spoke do didn’t seem to understand what I was talking about even thought it was a very simple request and the other because I couldn’t even get a response) certainly won’t be getting a second chance.

Keep pricing simple. Don’t make your pricing so complicated that people cannot understand what they are getting for their money. This often happens with brand new products or sometimes with all the best intensions when you are trying to offer discounts. But if the price is difficult to understand you will switch people off. In my own case – I ended up selecting my broadband supplier based on the one with a pricing structure I could actually understand – not necessarily because they were the cheapest or offered the best service.

Briefing staff. If you are running any form of advertising or promotion for your products and services make sure all of your staff are aware of it, especially the front line staff who may receive enquiries – which includes your receptionist/telephonist, your sales staff and the product development team. You should do this as a matter of course – partly because it’s good practice to make everyone in your business aware of the marketing activity you are undertaking but also because there are notable increases in motivation when a company is seen to be doing things to promote itself. But you absolutely must share the details when you are advertising a special offer, money off or exclusive deals. There is nothing worse than seeing an advert, picking up the phone to respond, only to get through to someone who says they know nothing about the 20% off that you refer to.

Failing to respond. This is so obvious I almost feel embarrassed writing about it – but it still happens – especially in the world of e-commerce. Have you ever called a company to enquiry about a product or service, sent an email or filled out an enquiry form on a website – or even called into a retail outlet to ask someone about something and not been able to find anyone to help or failed to get a sensible response? I know I have. I’ve made calls that haven’t been returned, sent emails that I have had no response to and even been into places like mobile phone shops where I’ve not been able to attract the attention of a sales person (too busy on the phone to their best friend) or when I have they’ve been unable to respond to my questions with enough detail to help me to buy. Aligned to this issue is the fact that again with the pace of commerce (especially on-line) you need to be able to respond quickly to enquiries. The expected speed of response in different markets can vary - you need to know what’s acceptable in the market that you operate in – and make sure you meet the standard – otherwise you will miss opportunities and ultimately waste money on marketing.

If you get these simple things right you can put yourself ahead of the competition in marketing terms – and that’s without actually spending anything.

Secret No. 5 – Setting Goals and Measuring

For any sales or marketing activity you undertake it is essential to set clear objectives at the outset.

How many times have you said – well that was a bit of a waste of time and money – in relation to some marketing activity you’ve undertaken? And if challenged were you able to say what the quantifiable objectives were? An advert in the local paper for example: how many calls were you expecting as a result, how many of those did you expect to result in a sale – and how realistic were those targets in the first place?

I tend to find that most people don’t set a target and then they are disappointed with the response. Why? - I’m never sure.

I firmly believe that one of the critical stages in making your marketing or advertising effective is the goal setting stage. It can impact on so many aspects – it might determine when you advertise or what your message is, it should certainly influence where you advertise and probably how responses are going to be handled.

Tips for measuring success:

Put codes on your adverts so that you can track response against specific activity
Give money off vouchers or include money off vouchers in ads (again so that you can track)
Use direct mail and e-marketing – because it’s measurable – you know more accurately who you have targeted and therefore can track response directly to that name or email address
Look at lead to sales ratios regularly to see if there are things going on in the sales process which are creating barriers – perhaps you are getting lots of enquiries from an advert but no one is buying. Why is that? What needs to change to make the advert pay its way?
Think long and hard before producing costly glossy brochures and set very strict objectives. What are they needed for and realistically how many will be used – I’ve seen too many boxes (even pallet loads in one organisation) thrown away.

So set clear goals and makes sure you measure progress against them.

Secret No. 6 – Planning

I am boring about this. Ad hoc marketing does not work in the long run. So develop a plan – a note of what you are planning to do, when, who’s responsible and how much it’s going to cost – and follow it. By all means refine it and develop it over time – but without a plan you are in danger of drifting from one unsuccessful marketing activity to another.

And of course each element of your plan should have targets and objectives that you can measure and review.

Like most businesses you will probably find the simple process of planning highlights opportunities and exposes potential problems which may be preventing you from maximising sales and making your marketing successful.

So as a final reminder of the secrets that could make your marketing more effective:

Know your audience and customers
Be credible and have clear messages
Do a good job for your customers so that they refer people to you
Make it easy to buy from your company
Set objectives, measure and monitor
Have a plan and work it.

Article written by Teresa Harris, Second Opinion Marketing. Teresa is an independent marketing consultant specialising in working with businesses that want to take advantage of market opportunities and grow. To contact Second Opinion Marketing call 01789 740396 or email tah@secondopinionmarketing.co.uk.

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