bath marketing consultancy.

2011- how has it been for you?

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With only a few working weeks left in 2011, Bath Marketing Consultancy does not know what sort of year you have had, but we are very much looking forward to the Christmas break. In all honesty, it is the “break” part of Christmas we are looking forward to as much as Christmas itself as 2011 has been a long (and phenomenal) year for the business.

Yes, we have worked with over 20 new clients from a huge variety of sectors, but not everything has been plain sailing. Without going into too much detail, I would like to think that I have learnt a great deal this year especially from some of the not so good things that have happened to Bath Marketing Consultancy in 2011.
I saw a quote sometime ago that went along the lines of “an unhappy client can be your best source of information” which has actually been quite apt. I am not saying that we have reams of unhappy clients; far from it. It is more that we have had to adapt with new situations which have tested the structure of how we work, our (low!) pricing, the way we schedule our work and the way we manage certain clients. We have come through all of these tests pretty much unscathed and all the better for doing so.

We have also seen a shift in the marketing requirements from our clients and an increase in the number of potential marketing suppliers prospects see before making their decisions. In terms of what people want from their marketing, the one off projects that played a part in our some of our success in 2010 have been replaced by ongoing marketing needs meaning that we play a much more important and ever present role in the organisations we work with. This has been incredibly rewarding.

What we are also seeing is that companies are becoming far more structured in the way they market their businesses and the thought processes they use. Clients and prospects are tending to look further ahead and see marketing as more of an investment for the future than a knee jerk reaction when times are quiet.

What about your marketing for 2012 and have you had a good year where you have learnt new skills?

Design and corporate identity

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Whenever you start thinking about corporate material, the question of design will rear its head. i.e do we use a new style; do we buy in someone to help, what style do we use etc. The next step usually is to review your corporate identity.
Yes, design undoubtedly has a vital role in the presentation and marketing of your organisation.

It is a key means for you to try and distinguish yourself from your competition. It is also a way to reveal your organisations’ “personality.” Traditionally the mix of your identity and house style will feature on your logo and corporate ID such as letters & faxes (if you still use fax!) as well as documents, proposals, stationary, leave behinds, creds presentations etc.

Under such circumstances it is crucial that any review comes from the person at the top of your organisation and, in Bath Marketing Consultancy’s opinion, that high quality outside professionals are brought in to handle the exercise. The need for authority inside and outside your organisation is because this operation is almost certain to result in proposals for some sort of change and this “change” may not be something everyone wants to undertake.

So…if you are to go down the professional route, a full and clear brief must be given to the company selected. This brief should focus on the personality of your business i.e. what does your brand stand for? Remember that design should work at an emotional and rational level so try and consider these aspects in your brief. It might even be worth collecting (subtly!) examples of what your competitor’s literature looks like as well as other examples from different sectors you like. When Bath Marketing Consultancy puts together initiatives like websites or marketing literature, we always do an audit of the existing material and then ask for a steer from clients as to what they like before putting together initial design ideas.

I would always advocate listening to the rationale from your designer and then taking a long term view when making decisions. I am all too aware of the difficulties of decision by committee, but make sure that your designer has identified who you are and what you stand for.
One area Bath Marketing Consultancy tends to insist on is some sort of style guide for a signed off logo which gives consistency across ongoing marketing material……and stops staff playing with the designs!

Finally, marketing initiatives like brochures might have a long shelf life so my suggestion would be to keep names of personnel out of the design (unless the details are yours and you own the business!).

Good luck!

The Marketing tools of the trade

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Marketing is a multifaceted process. It offers a wide range of tools for placing your service/product in front of clients and prospects. The main “tools” available are:

The web
Cold canvassing
PR
Advertising
Direct Marketing
Print
Conferences, seminars, exhibitions etc

Bath Marketing Consultancy suggests you use them all! If each tool is used for the right purpose, has the right objective, at the right time, for the right TA, they could be incredibly effective.

Before you say anything, I appreciate there are other marketing tools that I haven’t mentioned such as telesales (or telemarketing) which is ostensibly phone canvassing. However, there are 2 types of telesales, 1) is closing a sale and 2) is closing an appointment. The skills required for both to achieve success vary, i.e. to close a sale, you might use an introductory offer. To close an appointment, you may well use “I am in your area….”

The tools of the trade!

One initiative that may well yield results is client entertaining, but be careful that it doesn’t appear like bribery!

What marketing tools do you use and what works best? Feel free to leave me a comment.

Seasonal marketing

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Do you experience seasonal fluctuations with your business? If so, you are not alone! One of the trends that Bath Marketing Consultancy is experiencing right now is enquires from people experiencing just this; a period of downtime in their businesses due to the (supposed!) British summer.

Summer?


What these people seem to be saying, quite correctly is, “yes, I know the summer impacts on my business, but I am going to lay the marketing foundations for the Christmas period and get in touch with a marketing professional to help me.”

Fluctuations in a business are very hard to predict exactly, but there are times of the year when traditionally businesses will be quieter than others. For example, December and January tend to be quiet as the “silly season” is in place. In addition half terms, school holidays and then summer holidays. In fact, there may well be less of a buzz about in business when major sporting events are on like the Rugby World Cup, Football Cups, Olympics etc.

 During these times business is likely to be slower, enquiry rates may well fall and invoices take longer to be paid. We are all in the same boat! The trick is to make sure that you have a consistent marketing plan that will continue marketing your business during these quiet times.

You could look at bursts of marketing activity before these times or incentivising prospects to commit to working with you before they go away or take a holiday. Similarly, there is always the option of you mirroring these quiet times by taking time out too. 

One key area I would suggest is do not go quiet yourself with your own marketing or you risk going of radars. Yes, there is a possibility that the markets you appeal to may well become smaller in seasonal fluctuations, but there will still be a market there for you to talk to. So do not stop Blogging, Tweeting, Advertising, Link Building etc as continued marketing and brand awareness activity over a sustained period of time really pays dividends. 


Effective marketing comes after market research

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How many of us in business actually research our market before jumping straight in and starting a new business or embarking on a marketing drive? I would guess that most businesses have the idea first and then go straight to market without even asking anyone (especially their target market) whether their idea is a good one or not!

In a nutshell, if you define marketing as “identifying and then supplying customer needs,” my feeling is that market research provides the objective means of achieving this and, without conducting research, how do you know if there will be a demand for your business or not?

Being armed with a clear understanding of these “needs” prior to you building your sales & marketing plan could make all the difference. In addition, the results of the market research you employ should allow your organisation to differentiate itself from its competitors and hence build your brand and win business.

I believe there are roughly 5 main approaches you could employ when looking at research and these are – researching benefits and limitations, whether (and how) to brief a research agency, DIY research, qualitative studies and quantitative studies.

I could go over all 5, but for the SME, it is the DIY research that is probably most attractive as the costs are generally low and the business owner can drive things. So…….what areas do I suggest you look at?

Define your sample – the size, the location, the demographics etc
Choose your research method – telephone, email, face to face etc
Design a quality questionnaire – make it thorough and reflective
Collect your data
Clean your data
Make sure that all info is stored on your database
Interpret and report

None of the above is set in stone, but, in my experience, I would always want to invest time with the organisation I am working with to find out what they are all about before I started putting down a concrete plan……….and maybe, by researching their “offer” the process of marketing could be made slicker and more effective for the potential client too!

Just a thought…..

Link exchanging, yes or no?

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When looking to generate “inbound links” to your website, some of the easiest to get are ones where your website links to a website who is linking to you; a reciprocal link.  To do this generally requires some sort of communication between the website owners and then an agreement to link to one another.
Exchange links!
Since it is difficult to obtain most links from coveted and trustworthy sites, it is easy to get carried away exchanging links with other new or unestablished sites just because of the comparative ease of obtaining the links in link exchanges.

However, be warned, link exchanges are much less effective now than they used to be in the past and they have been known to cancel each other out. A savvy link-exchange campaign can give you one of the best boosts when your site is still new just because many of the other methods of obtaining links are just too tough for new sites to pull off.
If you do use link building as a way of boosting your websites’ SEO credibility, only do exchanges with websites in your market/sector that are reputable and trustworthy. Refrain from interlinking with other unestablished sites because more often than not you will just end up in bad link neighbourhoods which can actually cause you SEO damage instead of benefit.

Like any sort of online marketing activity involving links to your website, my advice is to seek help from someone professional who has experience of running these types of campaigns and use a combination of initiatives to give you the right balance.

Long-term authority is the name of the game!

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Once launched, a new website is unlikely to see much SEO traffic to start with, so Bath Marketing Consultancy’s suggestion is to focus on making long-term plans to get your website onto the radars that you want to be on. I have identified the need for your website to build “trust” and to ensure that your expectations of organic dominance be realistic, so below is an idea about the long term strategies you could consider.


I know I am in charge

One great strategy is to become an authority in some niche area. If you do this, you will earn links when other webmasters will need to link to credible sources and they will quite possibly link to you. When search engines see many consistent, new (quality) links into a website, the search engines begin to think that this site has authority and having authority is one of the biggest single determining factors in the rankings of pages within search results.


Unfortunately, if you are like a lot of websites, you don’t and won’t have real authority so it is up to you to make this into a non-problem. It is possible to mimic authority by providing a widget or an embed tag that lives on other sites. Since every time someone uses your widget that is hosted on your site, it also creates a link to your site, over time this will create an appearance of authority when many sites link to you just by using your widget.

However, a widget is not an easy thing to do so another way is to position your site as an expert in its field thus encouraging sites to link to you for reference purposes. For example, I have a client who operates in a very niche market and I suggested he get in touch with other (more established) site owners within his sector asking them to link to his site as the content he had written would support their site. In addition, I encouraged him to leave comments wherever possible on relevant Blogs and/or sites demonstrating his credibility within the sector. 


Sure enough, this process resulted in his website becoming more and more credible in its field and hence its position within Google has started to increase.


My next post will be on creating content for your website…..



Focus on Building Trust to increase your rankings

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It’s a lot to do with trust!

Following on from my previous post, new websites are given a little bit of trust by search engines, but simply not enough to rank for any significant terms. Trust has to be built and, once built, your website will start to climb the rankings within Google and its friends.

There are a number of ways to make a search engine view your site as what I would call “trustworthy.” One such way is to get into the habit of updating your site regularly with good quality, relevant content. By consistently creating good quality and new content, your website may well be good enough to earn links on its own.

Another great way to build trust is to get sites that are big and already trusted to link to your site. For example, for my website, a link from Marketing or Brand Republic would benefit me hugely as these sites are relevant to my industry and both far outperform me on a national level.

However, there are millions of trusted sites that very hugely. Links from sites that belong to universities (.edu domains), non-profits (.org domains), or large companies can carry quite a bit of trust with them. In a search engine’s mind, if a university (usually professor or student page) trusts you enough to link to you, then it is much more likely that your site can be trusted, and will likely rank higher.

In sum, to establish trust, always keep an eye on what you write and how you write it and look to better performing sites to link to you.

Bath Marketing Consultancy has got a total of 11 articles to write on the subject on Google positioning so keep your eyes peeled!

Advertising. Yes or no?

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Standing out?

Can advertising generate leads? Should it be a part of your marketing activity? What type works? Some quite strong questions for a Monday morning!

I believe that that there are limited numbers of prospects who buy in the professional services arena and, the infrequency of their purchase decision making makes a strong case for not doing any advertising at all. After all, why do so few ad agencies advertise? Maybe there is a message in that!!

Of course, for many years, some professional services were not permitted to advertise for ethical reasons (i.e. the legal sector), but, when these restrictions were lifted, their first impulse was to rush into advertising. But they forgot about below the line activity.

My main interest in advertising is whether it can generate leads; whether it should be taken seriously as a response generator. Do prospective clients come knocking as a result of an advert or does seeing an advert leave them cold? To me, advertising is about ensuring that prospects see the added value working with you brings. However, there are some professional establishments simply advertise to satisfy their egos………….and to annoy their competitors!

There is one obvious situation where advertising would seem an obvious route to market – the launch of a new product or service……or what I like to call “Announcement advertising.” However, for this to be truly effective, the advertising needs to be full of flair and create a buzz around the market. I have tried to do this with my latest Bath Life advert promoting my website/CMS package using a chocolate cake.

Wherever possible try (as written about by a fellow Tweeter Andy from Pro Ipbx), and put a response mechanism in place to allow reactions to get straight back to you. Or, at least ensure that you find some way of viewing effectiveness. Maybe by simply asking enquirers or promoting a particular page on your website that can be viewed via analytics.

Although it is sometimes hard to quantify, I believe advertising does create curiosity. It can also lay the foundation for other marketing initiatives such as e marketing or direct mail. It can also generate real positive feelings internally from your employees by showing real commitment to the business and raising morale. Hmm, but does this answer the question of its use? Tough one.

There will be plenty more on this subject from me tomorrow and later in the week, but, what do you think? Let me know by leaving a comment. Let’s share experiences!

SME Marketing Tips

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Below is a list of 7 simple tips to help the SME when considering marketing activity. They are simple, low-cost ways for any small business to find customers and generate sales quickly.


1. Don’t Advertise Like a Big Business. Big businesses advertise to create name recognition and future sales. A small business can’t afford to do that. Instead, design your advertising to produce sales …now. One way to accomplish this is to always include an offer in your advertising – and an easy way for prospective customers to respond to it.


2. Offer a Cheaper Version. Some prospective customers are not willing to pay the asking price for your product or service. Others are more interested in paying a low price than in getting the best quality. You can avoid losing sales to many of these customers by offering a smaller or stripped down version of your product or service at a lower price. 
3. Offer a Premium Version. Not all customers are looking for a cheap price. Many are willing to pay a higher price to get a premium product or service. You can boost your average size sale and your total revenue by offering a more comprehensive product or service …or by combining several products or services in a special premium package offer for a higher price. 
4. Try Some Unusual Marketing Methods. Look for some unconventional marketing methods your competitors are overlooking. You may discover some highly profitable ways to generate sales and avoid competition. For example, print your best small ad on a postcard and mail it to prospects in your targeted market. A small ad on a postcard can drive a high volume of traffic to your website or generate a flood of sales leads for a very small cost. 
5. Trim Your Ads. Reduce the size of your ads so you can run more ads for the same cost. You may even be surprised to find that some of your short ads generate a better response than their longer versions. 

6. Set up Joint Promotions with Other Small Businesses. Contact some non-competing small businesses serving customers in your market. Offer to publicize their products or services to your customers in exchange for their publicizing your services to their customers. This usually produces a large number of sales for a very low cost. 
7. Take Advantage of Your Customers. Your customers already know and trust you. It’s easier to get more business from them than to get any business from somebody who never bought from you. Take advantage of this by creating some special deals just for your existing customers …and announce new products and services to them before you announce them to the general market. 


Also, convert your customers into publicity agents for your business. Develop an incentive for them to tell associates and friends about the value of your products or services. An endorsement from them is more effective than any amount of advertising – and it is much cheaper!!

Are you an SME looking for help with your marketing? Why not put Bath Marketing Consultancy to the test?