Does your marketing happen on an ad-hoc basis, reacting to whatever opportunity comes your way? If so, the chances are you are wasting money on activities that are not helping you communicate with your target audience and therefore helping to generate new enquiries and sales.
In a previous article, ‘Communicating with Clients’, we mentioned different activities you could implement to help develop your relationship with clients. Today, we highlight some of the processes which you can adopt to help make your marketing happen.
A 6 – 12 month marketing action plan
Whether you create this in an Excel spreadsheet or on a sheet of paper, it doesn’t matter, as long as you have something which is a visual record of what marketing activities you want to implement throughout the coming months. 12-month plans used to be the norm, but these days more and more firms are working to 6 month plans to give them more flexibility to adapt and change as the year goes on.
The marketing action plan should set out:
- Which services do you want to promote?
- Who do you want to promote these to (if you have different groups of clients/prospects)?
- The different types of marketing activities that will be adopted (e.g. mailings, social media, attending events, advertising campaigns etc).
- Who’s responsible for implementing the activities – internally or externally?
- What budget you have allocated to the different activities.
- The actual timings/deadlines.
By creating a 6 – 12 month marketing action plan you will avoid a ‘feast or famine’ approach to your marketing, it also helps you to manage your resources so you can spread out your manpower and cash flow to fit with the ebb and flow of your business.
Central Database/CRM System
The focus here is on central, i.e. one system which everyone uses.
The benefits of having a central database are:
- You build a central system of contact details and information for both clients and prospects, which gives you the information you need to implement your marketing activities quickly and easily, such as pulling together a mailing list or a list of emails that you can send to.
- You can build profiles of your clients and prospects by – sectors, business size, current services used by the client, what services they could be using etc. This helps you to identify specific client segments within the database who you want to send relevant information.
- It helps you to target individual clients, either to give them information that they would find useful as part of a client care initiative or to cross-sell other products and services.
- It also helps you to target prospective clients. Once they become a client you don’t need to create a new record for them on the system, as the information is already there.
Get a Mentor
If there’s just you in your firm, or you’re the one that is responsible for implementing marketing activities, you need to make yourself accountable for your actions. The best way of achieving this is by getting someone to act as a mentor or coach, who will get you to report back weekly, monthly, quarterly etc, so that you become responsible for your actions and what they have achieved. This could be someone internal to your organisation, or you may want to outsource to a marketing expert who would offer support, whilst challenging you to carry out your marketing activities.
Monitoring Activities
Doing lots of different marketing activities is great, but worthless if you’re not tracking how successful each one is. So during and after each marketing activity, you need to monitor the following things:
- What direct responses were received: inbound phone calls or emails; website enquiries; appointments arranged; delegates booked to attend a seminar; the number of business cards/leaflets handed out; new clients signed up etc.
- Who you’ve communicated with, but more importantly is there anyone you’ve missed out?
- Feedback from individual communications – are your messages hitting the spot, or do you need to tweak them; was the timing right; was the marketing activity you adopted appropriate for the task, i.e. placing an advert in the local press about an open day you’re organising vs sending direct invitations and making follow up calls to the target people you want to attend.
- Cost vs benefit – are you getting a good return on your time and money from each marketing activity? Don’t just consider the actual cost of the activity, but weigh this up against the lifetime value of keeping a new client who may join as a result of the activity.
Whilst a lot of marketing does require an element of creativity, whether that’s in writing copy or designing artwork, there is a lot of admin-type work involved. Consider implementing processes into your firm which make it easy to repeat marketing campaigns and that help you keep track of what’s working and what isn’t.
