Communiqué SME March 2010

OK, so I got it wrong! Ali Bastian didn’t even make it to the Strictly Come Dancing final, never mind win it. My prediction in my pre-Christmas epistle didn’t come to pass – isn’t hindsight a wonderful thing?

My second childhood!

I know Christmas seems like a lifetime away but its only 10 weeks actually. So what did you get? My favourite gift was a Morris Mini Cooper which won the Monte Carlo Rally four years running in the sixties – well the Scalextric model of it anyway. It’s ubercool in red with two thick white stripes running across its top. Santa gave me the track with two cars a couple of years ago, well before James May made Scalextric cool again through the ‘Toy Stories’ TV series. I’ve planned lots of race meets with friends and family for 2010.

Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be!

It’s a year of significant milestones for us - a 16^th, 50^th and 70^th birthday and a 25^th wedding anniversary in the family. No doubt there’ll be lots of nostalgic moments. It’s only natural to look back and reminisce, albeit we tend to view the past with rose tinted specs. Young people aren’t what they used to be, exams are nowhere near as difficult as they were in our day and so on.

What’s your marketing track record like?

So what about your marketing? How does the present compare to the past? Here I find hindsight is a real boon. But I don’t rely on nostalgia at all. Hard historical facts are what I rely on to tell me what’s happened. I cannot go forward with confidence if I don’t know what has and hasn’t worked.

Help! My marketing isn’t working!

You can learn so much about your marketing by reviewing how things have gone. It’s so easy in a small business to think you have your finger on the pulse but rarely do I come across an SME which cannot learn something critical by doing some formal measurement of performance. Going into the future knowing what has worked and what has not is a great confidence booster and liberating. So often we say ‘My marketing isn’t working’ but we don’t know which bits.

Work SMARTER in 2010

To help you get a handle on what is happening in your business and how your marketing is working for you I’ve made a list of things I suggest you measure on a regular basis.

Armed with this you should be able to make some specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, timed (SMART) goals, on which you can pin your marketing efforts for 2010.

Carolyn Page

Measure! Measure! Measure!

Some basic business performance questions you should be asking yourself on a regular basis to inform and assess your marketing activity:

· What proportion of our customer base accounts for what proportion of our sales? You should focus the bulk of your marketing effort on your top performing customers.

· How many (active) customers do we have? If you rely on a small customer base you may need to focus some effort on spreading the risk and acquiring some new ones.

· What are our customers buying? Are there some real winning products and services which attract people in? Can we do some cross-selling?

· Which products, services and customers are profitable? Face facts, are there some things you should axe? Are there some customers you would be better off without? What makes a customer profitable for you and how can you find more of them?

· What is our average order value? Could you boost sales simply by getting your existing customers to spend a bit more?

· How often do we get repeat business? Are you actively seeking repeat business through marketing activity?

· How many enquiries have we received and how many have we converted into new business? Do you need to put more effort into how you handle enquiries? Do you need to brush up on your selling skills to convert enquiries into orders?

· Where are our enquiries coming from and how much have they cost?

· How are people interacting with us on our website, and through other channels such as blogs and social media? If your web developer doesn’t provide data on your website traffic sign up for Google Analytics. You can monitor and measure social networking activity too.

Free marketing review

If you’re prompted by our tips to do some number crunching and want to sit down and discuss what marketing is and isn’t working for you, give us a call and we’ll book you in for a one-hour marketing review – on the house!

At the meeting we’ll give you a spreadsheet to help you monitor your marketing activity on an ongoing basis.

0845 4 300 900

Want to grow your business in 2010?

Our interactive Quick Draw Marketing Planning workshop on

28^th April will help you create a simple plan for your marketing in 2010, so that you stop wasting money and start doing marketing that grows your business.

See how Hannah Jones of Blue Kite Coach was helped by this workshop.

Next month in Communiqué – your very own secret millionaire

Are you making the most of the multi-million pound marketing investment that has been made in your business?

Previous issues of Communiqué

If you’d like to review what was in previous issues of Communiqué, because this is the first one you’ve read and you’d like to see what else we’ve covered, or because you’ve lost your old copies, here they are:

October 2009

How to get noticed

December 2009

Strictly Come Marketing

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