Last updated Feb 23, 2024 and written by Admin

How To Make A Difference To Your Marketing Today

The objective of any form of marketing activity is relatively simple; to communicate your company’s product or service to people and encourage them to buy from you rather than your competitors. However, as we have said on this blog, marketing is a costly endeavour and if it planned incorrectly or executed poorly, it can be at best non- productive and at worst brand damaging. The fact that marketing can be so expensive has posed a significant challenge to the small business and company formation sector. As a result for many small businesses, their marketing efforts have been costly mistakes. In this post we show you two simple strategies that will make a significant difference to the effectiveness of your marketing.

Understanding customer retention
For most small businesses, the fundamental objective of any sort of promotional activity is to generate incremental revenue. As a consequence, small business owners, concentrate all their marketing efforts around gaining new customers. However, while this seems perfectly reasonable, it is a potentially short sighted strategy.

The best source of incremental revenue is your existing consumer base. These are the people who have developed a relationship with your brand and you have already directed significant resource into attracting them. On the whole, it is normally ten times easier to market to someone who has already bought from you than someone who is a complete stranger to the brand and proposition.

One of the key areas most small businesses overlook is customer retention. To find out if you are currently making this mistake, ask yourself the following questions:
– How often do you communicate with them?
– Do you offer any loyalty incentive?
– What would be the result, if you tripled the amount of communication you currently have with them?

While this may sound relatively simple, you would be surprised by the number of companies who overlook this basic revenue stream.

Explore new communication platforms
When we ask businesses what forms of marketing they currently use, they mostly say that they use two different platforms. This could be events, public relations, newspapers, radio, direct mail or point of sale activity.

However, as the objective of all marketing activity is incremental income, why are you limiting the number of people you communicate with by only using two mediums? This is a common mistake of most small businesses and entrepreneurs who have recently entered the company formation sector; they fail to see the bigger picture.
As always, the most important element of marketing is establishing a return on investment. So why not become more integrated in your approach? if you are planning a large direct mail campaign, support it with some online activity. Similarly, if you are beginning to do some direct email, encourage your existing consumers to engage with your social media activity.  After each campaign, review the activity and look at what it has contributed to the profitability of your business.