Continuously Marketing Your Services
There’s a theory that you need to ‘touch’ a customer seven times before they buy from you. A touch is them seeing your marketing material, a blog post, your website, a google advert, a tweet, a story in the paper, hear your radio advert, a facebook post, receiving a letter and, well, I’ll stop there because you get the idea. It’s an old theory but still good, although with all the methods of contact we have at our disposal these days, it’s probably more like 17!
As new methods of touching customers become available, we tend to drop some of the more troublesome or expensive ones in favour of the easy, cheap and instant ones. Direct mail for instance, Royal Mail are reporting increased revenues for direct mail but that masks a 9% fall in actual volumes. You don’t have to be an economist to understand that a fall in volumes resulting in increased revenue means that it’s getting more expensive to send letters. This also means that your chance of your letter standing out is improving, the rarer it gets. Why would you put together an expensive direct mail campaign when you can send a dozen tweets in a day for nothing, right?
Well, it might be easy, but are your customers on twitter? Are your competitors out-tweeting you? Are you sending 6 tweets a day and leaving it a month?
What are the smart companies doing?
This is easy. They are creating a plan and sticking to it. A good plan will include a calendar of activity based on where your customers hang out, and what they respond to. It will also include who will be responsible for carrying out the activity.
The top 1% of companies are also doing some form of measurement on this activity too. This can be in the form of a printed or online voucher, a reply form, using website landing pages or tracked phone numbers. A plan (some people will call this a marketing strategy) should last 12 months and include seasonal or topical activity. For example an accountant would consider a PR piece about getting your tax return completed a few weeks before the deadline, or a plumber might think an advert for outside taps a good activity for springtime. For sure, most of your activity should have a strong call to action where appropriate.
Need a Marketing Plan?
We can help. From Estate Agencies to Plumbers, Accountants to Jewellers, Retail, Business to business and even third sector or membership organisations, we can help. Why not drop in for a chat, tell us about your business and we’ll share some of our success stories. Call 01952 457392.