The 3 most important components of any marketing piece (get the first 1 wrong and the other 2 are meaningless)

Getting your marketing right is one of the most important, yet least understood, skills that business owners need to become masters of. A great deal of businesses grow by accident and not design; by that, I mean that, if asked, ‘which marketing channels are working and which aren’t?’ they will not know and usually give the answer, “We’re getting customers, so our marketing must be working.” Day in, day out, year in, year out, millions of pounds are wasted on ineffectual marketing that business owners turn a blind eye to because of their lack of understanding. The theme of our blogs/newsletters over the coming weeks will be to help you get a much better understanding, become more effective and gain a greater return from all your marketing.

A good place to start is to get really clear about what marketing is. The late marketing genius Jay Conrad Levison described marketing as being, “The precious connection between you and whoever buys what you sell.” From that we can glean that it is not just restricted to the attraction of new customers, but also customers you already have.  Yet, most marketing has a one size fits all approach to it.

So the first key to get your marketing working consistently is to decide specifically who you are talking to, followed by what you want to communicate and how you are going to say it. In simple terms, Target-Offer-Copy.

Of these three areas, the most important (and the one on which most time should be spent), is the target or who specifically you want to talk to. Once you are clear on this you’re marketing gets a whole lot easier.

For instance, consider someone running an up market Opticians who would like to educate his people about their new range of designer frames. They could use the usual marketing approach and aim to hit everybody, but they would waste a lot of time, energy and money trying to teach people who have no interest whatsoever in their new product range. So let’s look at how they can focus on communicating with the people who would be interested.

I am going to assume here that the purpose of the marketing is to appeal to new customers and that other strategies are in place to get existing customers to come back more often. However, existing customers are a great place to start when looking for new customers.

An exercise every business should consider a must, is to grade their present customers A,B,C or D.

A grade customers are just awesome to do business with. They pay on time, make plenty of purchases from across the range and are constantly singing your praises to other potential customers.

B grade customers are what are commonly known as your bread and butter customers they buy regularly, and cause no headaches.

C grade customers buy irregularly, are not quick to pay and can be quite demanding.

D grade customers cause you a great deal of stress. They quibble over price, complain and tend to be late payers. If you were to dig deep into the business you do with them they may well be unprofitable customers!

Our opticians want to communicate with more potential A grade customers and the best place for them to start is by looking through their present database and identify the common features of the A grade clients they already have. Let’s assume they carry out this exercise and they identify their A grade customers to be 40-60 year old professionals living in a ten mile radius of a rather affluent and up-market area.

From this information they now have the basis for making a compelling offer. They realise that their ideal customer is almost certainly cash rich and yet could be time poor, so they would want to maximise any experience and wouldn’t mind paying a premium for it. So the offer will need to educate potential new clients to the excellent experience that our opticians provide and how it was head and heels above that provided by their competition. That experience could include, home fittings (no need to visit the practice), out of hours appointments, private fittings, a range of up market refreshments, their own dedicated advisor, appointment reminders by text, and special deals with local up-market shops and restaurants.

Now they have their target and are providing a compelling offer the next step is to find the best channels to communicate with their potential new customers. For this, they need to think about where they can find them in the highest concentration. Where do they socialise? What do they read? What might they listen to? Who else are they already buying from?

From this information they can decide what form of marketing is to be used. This could include direct mail, magazine ads, radio, social media, etc. The list is extensive and the key to getting it right is to batch test and measure. This entails trying out a two different marketing messages in small batches and measuring the results. This will give them a far greater idea of the most cost effective way to succeed with the marketing campaign.

Now, whilst I have used an up-market opticians as an example, the process is the same for any business, once you get really clear on who you are targeting, create a compelling offer for your target, only then are you able to write the copy that is going to attract new customers.

Finally, your copy needs to have a clear call to action, something that will get your potential customers to take some form of action, be that call you, visit your website etc.

If you’d like to discover more about getting the most from your marketing join us on April 24^th 9-12.30 pm click here for full details and grab yourself an early bird deal

Thoughts:

“Man who chases two rabbits catches none”…Confucius

“The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself”…Peter F Drucker

“Marketing is not an event, but a process…it has a beginning, a middle, but never an end, for it is a process. You improve it, perfect it, change it, even pause it, but you never stop it completely”…Jay Conrad Levinson

“No matter what your product is, you are ultimately in the education business. Your customers need to be constantly educated about the many advantages of doing business with you, trained to use your products more effectively, and taught how to make never-ending improvement in their lives”…Robert G Allen

Dedicated to your success

Susan
Business Performance Coach

Would like to explore the possibility of working with Kevin or Susan as your Business/Executive Coach or would like some training for your team?
Simply drop us an email at info@mpcforprofit.com or call the office on 0151 348 1202 and we can pop a date in the diary for a coffee and a chat that just might Grow your profit, Transform your business and Change your life.