For most small businesses and professionals it’s always difficult to find time to take stock and think about where to focus your marketing effort and investment in the future. But doing so can be invaluable. In this article we give a few pointers on some of the things you might want to consider when planning your marketing activities for the future.
What’s Worked and What Hasn’t?
A good starting point might be to make a simple list (or review your plan, if you have one) of all the marketing activities you’ve been involved in during 2002. Don’t miss anything out. Think about press releases or newspaper coverage you may have had; advertising and sponsorship; leaflets you produced and distributed; direct mail; your website and other on-line advertising and promotions, partnerships you built and networking events you attended.
You may end up with quite a long list. Which brings me to the first point I suppose – has your marketing activity been focussed enough and have you got the best results?
Measuring Success
Think about how much you spent on each activity and review the actual amount of response or business each activity generated – what do you mean you didn’t measure it! If this is true you won’t be alone but now might be a good time to put it right.
Point two and learning for 2003 – make sure you can measure the effectiveness of all advertising and marketing that you do – and if you want to be ruthless about it - if you can’t measure it don’t do it. Most small businesses I’ve worked with can find a simple system for monitoring response (whether they use their accounts system or set up a more sophisticated database) and they quickly realise the effort in putting in the system has been well worth it when they realise the thing that cost the most has been producing the worst results and some of the things that cost very little can really reap rewards.
Take a Look at Your Image
No - this isn’t just something for Tesco, Barclays Bank and IBMs of this world. Every business and organisation has a brand image and it’s embodied in the way you do business and the quality of your products and services, but it’s expressed in the way you present yourself/your business to the outside world. This can be difficult to do objectively – because you are often so close to things yourself. But step back for a moment and review the image created by everything from your letter headed paper and business cards, to order forms, product leaflets, your website, company brochures and even your website, company brochures and even more fundamentally things like your company name.
This final point deserves explanation. I came across a business recently who used one name on their website and for on-line trading activities, and a completely different name (and branding) off-line. Now there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that if they are run...
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