Posts Tagged ‘Marketing Plan’

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Marketing Podcast: 2012 Marketing Planning

Friday, January 20th, 2012

For the first “Getting Down to Business” of 2012, Dave Weatherholt and I teamed up to talk small business planning. Dave covered some important financial steps every small business should take, while I focused on marketing tips to get your marketing plan in shape for the coming year. I’ve linked to the entire show, so enjoy an hour of Getting Down to Business!

Listen or download below:

Marketing Podcast: 2012 Marketing Planning

This segment first aired during “Getting Down to Business” on Alaska’s Fox News Talk 1020.

 

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Posted in Business Plan, Marketing Podcasts, Small Business | No Comments »

2012 Marketing Planning – It’s Not Too Late

Friday, December 23rd, 2011

Conventional wisdom says all businesses finished their 2012 marketing plan by November, wrapped it in a bow and are ready to implement come January 1.

I venture to guess that is an overly optimistic perspective for many businesses. In November, most small businesses are striving to finish up the current year in a good state.

In fact, January is a great time to plan for the rest of the year. The previous year’s results are final; holiday vacations are over, and employees are refreshed and ready to dive in.

As you start focusing on the new year, consider these tips in developing your 2012 marketing plan.

Your 2012 Marketing Plan

What do you hope your business will look like in 2012? Understanding your goals is key to developing your marketing plan. If you can answer the following questions, you can plan to succeed:

  • How do you want 2012 to be different from 2011?
  • How do you want it to be the same?
  • Will your market environment change in 2012?
  • Who should be your customers in 2012?
  • Should you offer any new products and services this year to meet those customers’ needs?
  • What are your revenue and profitability goals?

Evaluate your marketing activities from the previous year. Being a spreadsheet fanatic, I make a spreadsheet of all activities, including their cost, metrics and attributable revenue. For instance, with a pay-per-click advertising campaign, your metrics will include how many visits to your website or how many phone calls you received.

Using this information, determine which marketing activities you will stop doing this year. You should stop any activities that don’t help meet your goals or have no hope of being profitable this year. Easy, right?

Now, decide which marketing activities you will continue and if you need any new initiatives or strategies. If you expect 2012 to be quite different from 2011, your marketing activities will very likely change dramatically. Perhaps your goal is to connect more deeply with your local community, so you might change from a strategy of print and TV advertising to sponsoring and developing local events.

Next, consider your marketing “capital improvements”– investments you made last year whose benefits continue into this year. Perhaps you redesigned your website, invested in a CRM system or wrapped your service fleet in new graphics. Based on your goals, are there any large investments you need to make this year?

Taking a look at all the marketing activities that will help you reach your 2012 goals, create a budget and timeframe for implementing them. Determine if you need additional marketing partners or if your current resources are sufficient.

Finally, make sure you actually implement your marketing plan! Get started right away… after all, 2012 is already upon us.

Need help with your 2012 marketing plan? Sometimes an independent assessment can help you prioritize your goals and put things into perspective. I’d be glad to talk with you… just email me at amanda@zooinajungle.com or give me a call at 513.833.4203.

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Posted in Branding, Business Plan, Small Business | 1 Comment »

Should I be on Twitter?

Tuesday, November 29th, 2011

If you answer “Yes” to the following two questions, you should probably include a Twitter presence in your marketing plan:

  • Are you interesting?
  • Are your customers on Twitter?

That is my basic litmus test to answer if a business or person should be on Twitter. More specifically, personalities, speakers, authors, thought leaders, news organizations, technology companies and similar groups should make room in the marketing budget for Twitter.

Who shouldn’t be on Twitter?

To effectively market with Twitter requires quite a time commitment– you have to develop a community of followers by engaging in conversation and keeping them interested. If your customers don’t use Twitter, don’t bother including it in your marketing activities. It’s OK to just say “No!” to any marketing activity that won’t help you reach your business goals.

What should I say?

Marketing on Twitter is less about what you say and more about how you participate. People use Twitter for news, stories, conversations, and to learn what others are thinking right this moment about important (and not-so-important) issues in their lives. No one uses Twitter to receive deals or special offers from businesses. Be friendly and join conversations. Consider Twitter the cocktail party of marketing more than a megaphone.

What about that Twitter vocab?

Here’s some Twitter vocabulary to get you started.

  • Tweep – a Twitter user
  • Tweet – What tweeps post
  • # – This little guy is called a hashtag, and it allows tweeps to add categories to their tweets. For instance, #marketing would be a tweet about marketing. Usually, event organizers specify a hashtag to use when attendees are tweeting from the event, so people the world over can follow the happenings.
  • RT – Retweet. Give credit where credit is due. If you repost someone’s tweet, credit them with RT @username.

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Posted in Relationships, Social Networking, Technical Tips, word-of-mouth marketing | 1 Comment »

Marketing Jargon Defined

Friday, November 11th, 2011

For many small businesses, one of the most confusing things about marketing is the jargon.When talking with marketing professionals and vendors, sometimes these words get tossed out without any definition. Here’s a quick list of some of the most common  marketing jargon:

  • Marketing Mix – The marketing activities that make up your marketing plan. For instance, e-mail marketing, pay-per-click advertising and promotional events.
  • Target – The customers you are trying to reach with your marketing efforts (You’ve probably noticed that many marketing terms have militaristic origins. I think this is a terrible way to think about marketing, as I wrote in this article – “Marketing isn’t war on your customers“).
  • Copy – The written content on a business’s website, blog, brochures, advertisements, etc.
  • SEO – Search Engine Optimization. The ongoing process of making a website attractive to search engines like Google.
  • SEM – Search Engine Marketing. This encompasses the marketing mix a business uses to market to users of search engines, both SEO and advertising.
  • CPM – Cost Per Mille. In the advertising world, this is the cost per one thousand showings of your ad. Sometimes, it’s also referred to as Cost Per Impression.
  • Impression – An impression is when your ad is visible to view. For instance, each time a banner ad loads on a web page it counts as an impression. But just because the ad is visible doesn’t guarantee a person is actually looking at it!
  • PPC – Pay Per Click. This is the type of internet advertising made popular by Google and is used by all the search engines, along with Facebook. It means you pay for the advertising when someone clicks on your ad.
  • CPC – Cost Per Click. How much each click costs in a PPC advertising campaign.
  • Viral Marketing – Marketing efforts that are started by a business but grow and become controlled by groups of customers. For instance, you’ve probably heard of a video that has “gone viral.”

Have any other marketing jargon you’d like defined? Just post a comment, and I’ll be glad to help!

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Posted in Advertising, Marketing, Small Business, Technical Tips | No Comments »

Know Your Customer

Friday, July 8th, 2011

An effective marketing team knows their customers. They know where to spend their marketing dollars to get the most effect and what messages will resonate with different groups. This customized marketing approach yields a valuable return-on-investment.

However, a one-size-fits-all approach to marketing guarantees marketers will spend more money for less effective results. When they don’t know their customers and their preferences, they must send a variety of messages using many different media.

Yet, many businesses don’t put much effort into learning about their customers.

Below are three examples of differences in customer behavior. You can see how different marketing strategies could be taken to meet their preferences and needs.

  • If your customers are primarily women, you need to know they behave differently from men. Marketing to women expert Marti Barletta writes about consumer behavior frequently, but in one particular post, “Guaranteeing Sales Success with Women,” she emphasizes that women are risk-averse and value warranties and guarantees more than men do.
  • If your customers are young, from 18-33, 80-89% of them can be found on social networking sites. But of those 74 or older who use the Internet, only 10-19% engage in social networking sites. This information is from Pew Internet.
  • If your customers are older and affluent, they might be choosing an urban lifestyle rather than a retirement community. Boston Consulting Group’s Michael Silverstein reports on his firm’s research that these consumers enjoy cooking at home and increasingly have more time to learn new hobbies.

How well do you know your customers? How many of them are women? What age groups buy from you the most? What are their incomes? Being able to answer these questions will help you customize your marketing plan with strategies that will reach your customers without wasting time and money on people who won’t buy from you.

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Posted in Advertising, Customers, Marketing Theory | No Comments »

Marketing Management: Keep Marketing!

Friday, June 3rd, 2011

Marketing management is an ongoing activity, and it’s key to your business’s success. Marketing is something you do everyday, whether you are conscious of it or not. From your customers’ perspective, every experience they have or belief they hold about your business has been crafted by your products and employes. Are you managing these experiences or leaving them to chance?

It’s fun and exciting to engage in a large marketing project like branding a new product or revitalizing your marketing with a social media blitz. But these large projects receive undue credit for a business’s success- it’s the day-to-day actions that cumulatively build success. Your customers need to be able to rely on you, not just when they first buy or when you launch a new campaign.

Here are some tips for managing your marketing:

  1. Set goals. Set daily, weekly or monthly goals for how the frequency of your marketing activities. For instance, your goals could be one local event per month, one email newsletter per month and one Facebook post per week.
  2. Make a schedule. Looming due dates have quite an effect on the human psyche. Set a firm schedule for your goals, like publishing a blog post every Wednesday morning.
  3. Monitor and make changes. Some marketing activities keep themselves going. For best results, you should monitor these activities and make changes based on your observations. For example, look at your Google AdWords each month to see what you can learn.
  4. Measure results. Managing your marketing can be hard work. Measure your results, so you can see which efforts are paying off and which aren’t. Stop the least effective ones, and put more energy into the producers.
  5. Show discipline. All of these tips are rooted in having the discipline to keep marketing. Discipline is the number one ingredient for marketing management success. It’s not sexy, but it’s true.

By managing your marketing, you will create a compelling story for customers to buy into. You just have to keep at it, everyday.

If you don’t have the time or energy to manage your marketing, you could look into hiring a professional to manage it for you. Conveniently, Zoo in a Jungle Marketing excels at marketing management. Contact me to talk about your business: Amanda Cullen, 513.833.4203, amanda@zooinajungle.com.

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Posted in Customers, Marketing, Marketing Theory | No Comments »

Cut Marketing Costs, Not Effectiveness

Friday, December 10th, 2010

As 2010 draws to a close, it’s time to finalize your marketing plan and budget for 2011. For next year, wouldn’t it be great to save money on your marketing efforts while not reducing their effectiveness?

I’ve found that almost every marketing budget carries some unneeded fat. An easy way to increase profitability is to make cuts where they won’t hurt.

Follow these four steps to cut costs, not effectiveness:

  1. Make a list of all marketing activities your business undertakes in a year: trade shows, public relations, advertising, sales trips, customer service training, etc.
  2. Write down how much money you spent on each item in the last year.
  3. Now write down how much revenue you can attribute to each activity.
  4. Do more of those activities that made money and less of those that lose money. Usually, this step is harder than it seems because our marketing plans are full of activities that we do from habit or to satisfy certain people in our businesses. But, for instance, if you lost money on trade shows, you shouldn’t keep investing in them, regardless of a perceived loss of reputation or “getting your name out there.”

This four-step process is simple, if you’re able to track the results of your marketing efforts. But do you have difficulty attributing revenue to each item? Here are some tips to track the effectiveness of your marketing channels in the future.

  • Unique toll-free numbers. There are services available to provide different toll-free numbers and track the calls you receive from each. Assign a different number to each advertising channel: radio, print and web. For more granularity, assign a different number to each campaign type.
  • Website analytics. If you haven’t already, install Google’s free Analytics on your web site. You can track the effectiveness of your pay per click advertising, other sites referring to your site, search terms visitors use to find your site, the geographical location of visitors and more.
  • Ask your advertisers. Advertisers should be able to provide results from your campaigns. Ask them about it.
  • Coupon codes. For any special offer you provide customers, use a unique coupon code you can use to track redemptions.
  • Lead tracking. When you record a new contact, track where the lead came from. Usually people don’t mind being asked, “How did you hear about us?” Store this information on a spreadsheet, contact application or lead manager like salesforce.com.

Some marketing efforts don’t have a clear return on investment, like training your receptionist to help customers find information or encouraging your sales staff to develop better relationships with customers. Fortunately, most efforts that have an unclear ROI also cost the least. And personal interactions have the biggest impact with your customers because customers will remember a phone call with a member of your team more than they will remember an advertisement they saw in the newspaper. When planning your marketing budget for 2011, cut costs, not effectiveness and promote interactions over impressions.

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Posted in Business Plan, Marketing | 4 Comments »

Let’s get started!

Friday, August 6th, 2010

Small Business Marketing for Startups

Yesterday, an acquaintance asked me for advice on his startup company’s marketing. He just didn’t know how to get started with his first customer. He wanted to know what kinds of brochures, business card or website he needed to get people interested.

I told him, “Decide who you want your customers to be.”

He replied, “Oh, you mean middle class or upper class?”

“No, I mean decide which specific people in which neighborhoods should be your customers. Get to know them, how they talk and what their needs are. Then you can start selling. Then you will know what should be on your website.”

When people first start looking for customers, their instinct is to look for large groups of people and hope to convince a few of those people to hire them. The idea is, “If I aim for all middle class families, surely I’ll get a couple of customers.” But this instinct is wrong. The more people with whom you try to communicate, the less each one will pay attention to you. For example, I imagine you rarely pay attention to the loudspeaker at the grocery store. It’s just not that meaningful to you because the grocery store is trying to communicate a general message to the entire store. When you try to be meaningful to everyone, you end up being meaningful to no one. Generalization for the masses is the worst way to sell a new (or any) product.

To find its first customer, a startup needs to get specific. Instead of selling to groups differentiated by demographics, sell to individual people. Talk their language and address their needs.

On a related note, marketing expert Steve Yastrow wrote two very helpful newsletters on how to differentiate your customers as individuals instead of groups– Do Differentiation Differently and How to Do Differentiation Differently. Steve’s essential message is:

“Your customer doesn’t really care if you are different. But he will be blown away if he sees that you think he is different.”

Showing your customer you think he is different is more work than blanketing a city with flyers- but it will also yield more results. As counterintuitive as it may seem, startups (and all companies) will find more customers if they focus on fewer people.

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Posted in Customers, Entrepreneurs, Marketing Theory, Selling | 2 Comments »

Small businesses, do you know where you want to go?

Friday, May 28th, 2010

Knowing your small business’ future is the most important thing you could be working on today. And yet so many small business owners don’t have a solid idea of where they want to take their businesses. Other, more immediate issues demand your attention every day – like how to solve your biggest customers’ problem with shipping or approving a purchase order for new office chairs. These decisions seem (and are) so important. But you’ll never know if you’re making the right decision unless you have a strategic framework of where you want to be in the future.

It may seem daunting to plan your business’ future. I recommend first developing a picture of success, then filling in the details based on how to paint that picture. This method was developed by Yastrow & Company, and we’ve used it for all of our joint clients.
The picture of success has two components. The first is a deadline, such as three months from now or in the next five years. The second is financial. What business results do you hope to enjoy?
Ask yourself, “Where do we want to be one year from today?”
Asking this question may yield answers such as:
We successfully introduced our products into three new markets and now 10% of our revenue comes from these new sources.
Revenue has grown 20% from our financial customers.
Sales from our new product category have grown 50%, as we’ve educated our existing customers about them.
We diversified our customer base so our largest customer no longer accounts for 30% of sales. This stability will allow us to take advantage of new opportunities.
Once you have envisioned your picture of success, you need to assemble the tools that will enable you to create it. List what customer actions have to take place and how you will facilitate those actions. Think about the big picture and what will have to change, such as product offerings, sales efforts or reporting systems. Also think about what must stay the same, perhaps your key philosophies or an unavoidable business reality.
Then apply your picture of success to all the details of your day. Before making decisions, determine how the outcome will affect your goal. Don’t be afraid to say no to new opportunities that won’t help you to reach your goal. Small business owners face a barrage of options every day – Should we advertise in this new publication? Should we start selling this new product? Should we enter into a referral partnership with another business? By keeping your picture of success front and center, these decisions become easy.
You won’t be able to reach your goal alone, which is why my next article will focus on involving your team in your picture of success. Your team includes employees, partners, vendors and everyone who will need to cooperate to reach your business goals.

It may seem daunting to plan your business’ future. I recommend first developing a picture of success, then filling in the details based on how to paint that picture. This method was developed by Yastrow & Company, and we’ve used it for all of our joint clients.

The picture of success has two components. The first is a deadline, such as three months from now or in the next five years. The second is financial. What business results do you hope to enjoy?

Ask your small business,
“Where do we want to be one year from today?”

Asking this question may yield answers such as:

  • We successfully introduced our products into three new markets and now 10% of our revenue comes from these new sources.
  • Revenue has grown 20% from our financial customers.
  • Sales from our new product category have grown 50%, as we’ve educated our existing customers about them.
  • We diversified our customer base so our largest customer no longer accounts for 30% of sales. This stability will allow us to take advantage of new opportunities.

Once you have envisioned your picture of success, you need to assemble the tools that will enable you to create it. List what customer actions have to take place and how you will facilitate those actions. Think about the big picture and what will have to change, such as product offerings, sales efforts or reporting systems. Also think about what must stay the same, perhaps your key philosophies or an unavoidable business reality.

Then apply your picture of success to all the details of your day. Before making decisions, determine how the outcome will affect your goal. Don’t be afraid to say no to new opportunities that won’t help you to reach your goal. Small business owners face a barrage of options every day – Should we advertise in this new publication? Should we start selling this new product? Should we enter into a referral partnership with another business? By keeping your picture of success front and center, these decisions become easy.

When each decision you make fits your picture of success, you will succeed. To make your deadline, be proactive about the most important factors affecting your success, and start making improvements to your small business today.

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Posted in Business Plan, Philosophy | No Comments »

Small Business Marketing Test

Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010

In my last post, I presented 5 small business marketing rules. Based on these rules, how does your marketing stack up? Take the test to find out!

To add up your own scores, take the test below. To use the automatic calculator, take the Small Business Marketing Test here.

1. Be easy to do business with:
Do you make your customers go through hoops?

Many small businesses don’t realize how their processes affect their customers’ experiences. Answer the following questions to identify if you are “easy to do business with.” Feel free to create your own questions to suit your particular business.

  • Does our billing cycle consider the customers’ schedule? Or is it based solely on our convenience?
  • Are we open when customers want to buy?
  • When a customer calls, does a person answer the phone?
  • Has a customer ever said something like, “I love that you are a small business. It makes things so much easier for me.”?

On a scale of 1-10, with ten being the best, how would you rate your company in this category?

2. Communicate with your customers in ways that are meaningful to them.

If you don’t communicate with customers in ways that are meaningful to them, your messages will be ignored. Evaluate your communications with the following questions.

  • Do you know how different customers like to be contacted? Which ones prefer email? Which ones prefer phone?
  • How is the response rate on your print/TV/radio advertising? Are you settling for the industry averages, or do you outperform?
  • When you communicate with your customers, does the message resonate with them? Be wary of messages such as, “We have the best technology!”
  • Do customers receive consistent messages from your company?

Based on your answers to these questions, how would you rate your company on a scale of 1-10?

3. Know where you want to go – What are your business goals?

If your company finds communicating with customers difficult, perhaps it’s because the company doesn’t have a future vision. Answer the following questions to determine if you know where you wan to go.

  • What should your revenue be in three years?
  • Are you planning on introducing any new products or services?
  • How much do you want to grow, and what resources will you require to do it?
  • What steps have you taken today to help achieve your company’s future success?

On a scale of 1-10, how well do you know your company’s intended future?

4. Involve your team

“No man is an island.” If you have employees, they should understand your business and should participate in communicating your marketing message to customers.

  • Can you remember an instance where an employee came to you with an idea, and you let her run with it?
  • Do you share financial information, like revenue projections, with your employees?
  • Do your employees feel that they will succeed if the business succeeds?
  • Do you help your employees focus on the big picture, or are they always caught up in the day-to-day minutiae of their jobs?

Rate how well your employees are engaged in your business, on a scale of 1-10.

5. Keep at it – How are your implementation skills?

We all know the best plans are worthless if they aren’t implemented.

  • In the past year, how many initiatives have you started? How many have you finished?
  • Have you ever heard an employee say something like, “Oh, we’ll never finish this project. We started something just like it last year, and management got bored before we finished.”?
  • Once you make a decision, do you monitor its progess during implementation?
  • Do you ever have follow-up reports on your initiatives to measure their success?

Are you an implementation novice or master? Rate your company from 1-10.

Add up your scores. How did you fare? If your company scored less than 50, there’s work to do.

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Posted in Marketing, Small Business | 1 Comment »

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