Inside Small Business | Small Business & Home Business Marketing

Top Five Cost Effective Marketing Strategies

By Scott Barnett, President of Art & Science of Marketing

Marketing is a struggle for many businesses. Off-target messages are communicated to poorly defined audiences, with little revenue resulting from the time and money expended.

The struggle comes from not understanding the critical distinction between marketing and marketing communications — marketing being the process of creating and keeping customers; marketing communications being just one of the tools to be used once you have developed sound marketing strategies.

Putting communications ahead of marketing strategy is a “ready, fire, aim� approach that will fail more often than not. Yet “ready, fire, aim� is what many businesses do.

How can businesses best promote themselves and avoid costly misfires? Here are a number of high impact marketing strategies that will help you to create and keep more customers.

Tune in to the buying behaviors of customers. Customers have logical and emotional reasons for selecting among competitive product and service offerings. To fine-tune your marketing strategy determine: how customers perceive the value of your product; how involved they are with your product; and, how strongly they feel about it. With this information you can definitively pinpoint why people do or don’t do business with you. Talk to customers about:

• The value they perceive in your product in terms of: uniqueness; quality; price/performance; convenience; return on investment
• Their involvement with your product category in terms of: extent of their knowledge; impact of your product on their business or lifestyle; willingness to recommend your product to others
• Their emotional ties to you such as: friendly relationships; feelings of loyalty; image; personal identification with your business

It’s amazing what you can accomplish when you truly tune in to customers. I once helped a company with sharply declining sales to spark a turnaround. Customers told us that the company ranked low in many ways: it wasn’t unique; the price/performance ratio was inferior; they did not have a strong sense of loyalty or willingness to recommend, etc. This information, while difficult for management to swallow, provided the insight needed to revive the company. If you are uncomfortable talking with customers about these important issues, hire a third party to do it. You need to know where you stand in the minds of your customers. Do your customers find anything distinctive about your products, services or relationships with them?

Create evangelists of your employees and customers. Word of mouth is the most powerful and cost effective way to promote your business. Enthusiastic employees share their opinions with family, friends, industry associates, and of course customers. Happy customers want to see you succeed and spread the word. I was fortunate to have a customer evangelist who closed hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales for me. When you treat people with integrity and appreciation they will help you in return. On the other hand, I recently ate at a restaurant where the food was excellent but the wait staff was sullen and impatient. I won’t recommend it or return. Are people saying nice things about your company?

Do quick concept tests of new product and service ideas with your customers. Customers like to give you feedback if you listen to them attentively. You can go to customers with sketch product concepts and get feedback that can be highly valuable. I presented a product sketch with preliminary specifications to the IT manager of a large corporation who said, “If you build that product at that price I’ll replace all of my old units with it.� He bought over $2 mil worth of the product. Another time I talked with a good customer about a new ad concept; he didn’t like it and made suggestions that led to a very successful lead generating campaign. Reward customers for their efforts to help you with special discounts, gift baskets, etc. I found that it improves participation when you make a charitable donation in their behalf ($5 to $10). Do you regularly ask customers for feedback, act on it, and reward them for it?

Identify the information seeking habits of your customers. To communicate efficiently with potential customers you need to know how they go about searching for information on your product category. Aside from personal referrals, customers may look to: the internet; Yellow Page listings; ratings services; directories; trade shows; conferences; trade publications; user groups; seminars; local papers — the list of possible information sources is vast. Ask your good customers how they first learned about you and what steps they took to find more information about your company. Was it easy or hard for them to find the information? Was any important information missing? Do you know the best media to reach potential customers?

Segment your customers into groups based on potential for repeat and referral business, and pamper the best segments with loyalty rewards. New business development is expensive. Sales and marketing costs for new customers can easily exceed 20% of revenue in the first year, making those accounts marginally profitable. Without new customers a business will atrophy; however, new customers must become loyal customers to make a business successful. Loyal customers not only cost less to service over time, with typical sales and marketing cost less than 10% of revenue, they also tend to be less price sensitive and refer other customers to you. And, loyal customers are most responsive to cross-selling and up-selling of your full line of products and services. Do you have methods to identify, profile, and pamper frequent users? Does your profile information enable you reach out to prospective frequent users?

Successful marketing strategies are based on: extensive dialogue with customers; excellent customer service; teams of passionate employees; and, carefully defined profiles of customers who provide profitable, long-term repeat business.

Here’s a simple marketing effectiveness check list to use the next time you are preparing to launch a new communications campaign. Ask yourself:

• Is your target audience of frequent users well defined?
• Does your audience use the media you have selected?
• Are you confident that your message will be well received?

If you answer yes to these questions, you’re doing cost effective marketing.

About the Author
Scott Barnett is President of Art & Science of Marketing (ASMI) http://www.better-faster.com. ASMI is a business consulting firm that helps high tech and industrial products companies to create and keep more customers.

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Tips For a Successful Small Business: Marketing

By Annabelle Brownell, Owner of Santa Barbara Baby Company

1. Image is Everything – Take Branding Seriously
Customers feel more comfortable buying from a company perceived as legitimate and professional. Your brand is your face. Your logo and associated marketing collateral should be designed professionally. This is especially true of your web site!

2. Word of mouth is strong marketing tool
You don’t work for yourself, you work for your customer…or else you won’t be working for yourself very long. A customer that has a great experience will recommend your business to others. Alternatively, a customer that has an unpleasant experience will not return or repurchase… and will usually communicate the experience with peers.

3. Cross promote through Partnerships
Find businesses that compliment your business and proactively seek cross-marketing programs. Hand out each others’ collateral to customers, package your products together, link to each others web sites, market at events together at the same table, recommend each other, share advertising space and so on. In many cases, your marketing costs will be fewer and customers plentiful.

4. Use the Internet to your advantage and employ Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques for your web site
A web site is your virtual store front. Many customers make their purchasing decisions solely based on web sites found via search engines such as Google and Yahoo!. If you have a product or service that can be sold online, then take full advantage of this marketing channel. Whether your customers are local or nationwide, their ability to find your web site is vital.

5. Do Your Own PR – It’s easy!
Take advantage of your local, regional, and national media by writing interesting press releases at least a couple of times a year. You can write about a grand opening, a story about how yourself and your new business, an event that you are sponsoring, a product you invented, etc. Pick up any publication that you believe would find your “news� interesting and simply email your press release (and photos if possible) to the editors - you can find their names and email addresses in the publication or on their web site. Any article written about your business is free advertising.

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Marketing Strategy: More Money With Remarkable Pricing and Packaging

By: Wendy Maynard, Remarkable Marketing

To make more money with what you are already offering, consider different marketing strategies to make it easier for people to purchase your services/products. Restructuring your pricing and packaging creates more options for your customers.

Here are some examples:

1) Bundle ‘em. Offer your services in monthly increments. Instead of working with people on a session-by-session basis, offer a bundle of services. For instance, a personal trainer can offer sets of workouts for 3 months, 6 months, or a year. Add value by including a workbook to chart workout progress. You can also create levels of advancement to create more options for clients. Consider a silver, gold, and platinum program. Each level is a higher price and offers more value to your clients.

If you offer products, consider other ways to bundle things. For instance, a garden shop can put together a spring garden package that includes flower bulbs, a trowel, wildflower seeds, and gardeners’ gloves. A restaurant could start packaging their sauces and selling them to customers to take home. A life coach could put together a notebook and CD set to sell online.

2) Change product usage. Railroad ties are now used as decorative items for landscaping. I’ve also noticed that antique stores are offering faucets as coat hangers. And how about those stretchy bands that people use for workouts?

Arm & Hammer Baking Soda has this marketing strategy dialed in. The product was originally for baking. On their website, the company also suggests you use baking soda for brushing your teeth, deodorizing your dog, extinguishing fires, cleansing your hands, rinsing your mouth, and for children’s crafts. As a result, a simple product that might only be purchased once in a while has been transformed into a must-have product.

3) Change your pricing options. Offer your customers an option of paying in installments. Give a discount if customers buy a service early or in bulk. Offer a credit card option or allow people to buy online. Give people coupons, discounts, frequent-buyer rewards, or loyal-customer rebates.

4) Offer it in a new way. A book or a workshop can be turned into a CD program. Certain prospects may not have time to read a book or attend a workshop; but with your new packaging option, they can listen to your program during their commute or at the gym on their mp3 player. A used furniture store could paint some of its chairs or old frames in creative colors and market them as functional art.

5) “Plus” it. There is a term called “plussing” that comes from Walt Disney’s constant efforts to continually make a good idea even better. An example of this is adding a scavenger hunt game to the waiting area of the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland Park - now even the pre-ride portion is fun. Hallmark Cards also uses the concept of plussing. When their creative team develops a new product idea, they invite all of their other divisions to follow the concept and spin off additional new products.

Action Step: Take a look at your packaging and pricing. What works well right now but can be plussed or made better? How can your services or products be bundled? What pricing options can you add? How can your products/services be made to be even more remarkable? By providing and marketing a variety of options to customers, you will make more sales.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Wendy Maynard, the Marketing Maven, publishes REMARKABLE MARKETING, a weekly e-zine for business owners, freelancers, and entrepreneurs. If you’re ready to skyrocket your sales, easily attract customers, and have more fun, get your FREE TIPS now at www.gomarketingmaven.com/ezine.html

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