Maintaining your marketing efforts is crucial in driving a healthy and regular rate of new business enquiries throughout 2013.
Having consistency in your marketing plan will help support your business through the inevitable peaks and troughs that we often encounter throughout the year.
A well thought out and robustly executed marketing plan will build your business. What’s important here is to plan activities that are within your budget, are simple to implement and that have the biggest impact on your target market. Always think about who you are wanting to target, how they ‘get’ their news, where are they and how can I ‘talk’ to as many of them as possible.
To kick-start the year the PaySmart team has identified 10 simple marketing activities to help build any business large or small. Take a look and see which activities you can embrace in planning the year ahead.
1. Track your income streams and tag it to specific marketing campaigns. For example, if you offer coupons or discounts, include a unique code for each new promotion and talk to your potential new customers, asking “how did you hear about us?” By identifying successful campaigns (and unsuccessful ones) you can adjust your marketing strategies.
2. Schedule customer surveys to help you identify strengths and weaknesses in your business
3. Regularly promote new products, major events, and successes through press releases, your website, newsletters, and other marketing materials.
4. Send former and potential customers updates about products and promotions.
5. Mail a postcard to prospects in your target market – people read postcards when the message is brief. A small advertisement on a postcard can drive a high volume of traffic to your web site and generate a flood of sales leads for a very small cost.
6. Rotate several marketing tactics and vary your approach – marketing can be fun, so take advantage of the thousands of opportunities available for communicating your value to customers.
7. Use buddy marketing to promote your business. For example, if you send out brochures, you could include a leaflet and/or business card of another business, which had agreed to do the same for you. This gives you the chance to reach a whole new pool of potential customers.
8. Use online shopping facilities to encourage passive purchases of your products or services.
9. Answer your phone differently. Spend 30 minutes on training your staff on how to answer the phone. Pleasant service will always sell!
10. Send a second offer to your customers immediately after they’ve purchased. Send a handwritten note to your customer thanking them for their business and informing them that upon their return with “this note” they may take advantage of a private offer. This will reaffirm their decision and encourage word of mouth sales.
