Marketing Workout

January, traditionally the biggest month in the year for Gym membership. Many join and many leave a few months later. The New Year is always a cue for resolutions and plans to change your lifestyle. Why not extend these to the marketing activities you use in your business?

Use 2008 to get your sales and marketing activities in great shape for increases in profits. Follow these steps to create your own marketing resolutions for 2008.

Set your goals in writing

• Increase sales by 5% each month.
• Grow your list of qualified prospects by 5 a month – 60 a year.
• Improve the response rate to your marketing activities.
• Launch the new product or service you have been planning for years.
• Try one new marketing activity each month.

Review these regularly and adapt or change your activity as necessary.

Monitor progress

You need to keep track of your progress to discover what works and what does not, so you do more of the things that work and eliminate the things that do not. You need to monitor:

• Where your qualified prospects come from.
• How many prospects you add each week.
• Your conversion rates, and the time taken to convert from a prospect to a customer.
• Your prospect list.
• The results of your marketing activities.

Warm up

• Review your prospects list. Are they really prospects or just a list of names from business cards collected at events?
• Review your customers. Probably 80% of your sales come from 20% of your customers. Do you know who they are? What about the other 80%?
• Have a profile of your ideal customer in mind. Try to answer the question “ What would be a good referral for you?”
• How could you reactivate lapsed/previous customers?
• What else could you sell to existing customers?
• Review your marketing. The chances are that 80% of your leads and sales will come from 20% of your activity. Work out what is working and what is not. Decide which areas need more work to improve results. Stop doing the marketing things that are not working and save money and time.
• Make sure in all your marketing messages the prospect knows what to do.
• Answer the question, “Why should customers buy from me rather than one of my competitors?”

Need a shortcut to success

Want help from Gareth to grow your business? Give him a call on 01226 290288 or email gareth@gapmanagement.co.uk

Growing

• Focus on the customer. Think like the customer. What influences their decisions? What is the problem they have that you solve? Read the magazines and papers they read. Listen as they talk.
• Improve your marketing messages. Customers buy the results of your product or services. Make sure they are clearly explained in terms the customer will understand.
• Try one new marketing activity each month. If you always go to the same networking event try another, try e-marketing, try PR but whatever you decide try something new and monitor results.
• Review your web site, update as necessary.
• Use headlines to attract attention in your marketing remember your business name is not a headline.
• Appeal to the emotions, use words like increase, reduce, improve, save, discover, free.
• Develop a regular system to keep in contact with prospects. It is far better to mail 100 prospects 7 times than 700 prospects just once.
• Have a follow – up system in place.
• Ask for referrals from your customers.
• Review your business circle of contacts.Can you produce marketing material that they could give to their customers? Keep in contact with this group.
• Sell to people who want to buy, get them to tell you why they want your product or service.

Cool down

• Create your “To Do List” of weekly and monthly marketing tasks.
• Make time for marketing. Book time in your diary for some marketing activity. Even it is only 60 minutes a week stick to it.
• Do not expect instant results, marketing takes time and needs patience and perseverance.

Pass it on

Please forward this article to a friend or colleague. Thank you.

Personal help just for you

For personal help with marketing and sales to grow your business contact me on 01226 290288 or email gareth@gapmanagement.co.uk

Suggestions for a future article?

If there is a subject you would like covered send an email to gareth@gapmanagement.co.uk

About GAP Management

GAP Management helps business owners and managers to focus their sales and marketing efforts to be more effective and to find win and keep customers, to grow their businesses and be successful whether they market in person, in print or on the web.