Spend Smarter and Improve Your Marketing Results by Viva La Brand President, Laura Sheridan
As businesses struggle to generate a profit, more executives than ever are considering cutting their marketing budgets. While examining and refocusing spending is smart, some businesses are using the current economic situation to their advantage. Their secret: switch to offense and steal market share while competitors are struggling.
Here’s how you can spend smarter and improve your marketing results:
1. Stop spending on marketing activities that you can’t prove work or don’t provide an opportunity for learning. Are you investing in marketing initiatives that you’ve done year after year without knowing the impact on sales, profitability and the customer experience? Are you busy working on projects that don’t offer an opportunity to learn and optimize results? Don’t spend without being certain you’re getting huge returns for your money and effort.
Setting up specific quantifiable metrics before launching a new marketing program is essential. If you have an ad agency, they should have the expertise to identify the appropriate metrics to measure the effectiveness of each media program. Then, you need to create the processes to capture data to evaluate the effort. If you don’t have an agency or the experienced talent internally, then you need to hire an experienced direct marketer.
2. Talk to your customers. Not sure if your marketing activities are reaching your target audience and inspiring them to interact with your brand? Then you need to initiate a conversation with your customers and prospects. Knowing what’s important to your customers and how they view your brand is fundamental to cost effectively marketing to them. Tailoring your product and marketing messages to their needs will result in business growth and increased customer loyalty.
And, touching base with your customers and prospects doesn’t have to cost a lot. If your customers prefer to interact via email, then a simple questionnaire from you can be sent to an unlimited distribution list for free. If your customers prefer the phone, then calls from you and your management team can be highly effective. Either approach will provide you with the information you need to determine how your customers want to learn about new products and services, cost savings, and general business information. With this information you can more effectively allocate your marketing dollars to activities that are relevant to your target audience.
3. Shift your marketing spend. Your media plan should be built around how your customers and prospects want to interact with you. Media consumption habits have changed dramatically. Consumers are embracing the opportunity to engage and converse with other people and brands online. We are shifting from an age of business broadcasting to business conversations. Social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter have experienced tremendous acceptance by consumers of all ages. In fact, Facebook has added 100 million users in less than nine months and the fastest growing segment is 55 – 65 year old females. LinkedIn is being used by 80% of companies as their primary tool to find employees.
Social media is not a fad. This is great news for small businesses that have a built a reputation for personalizing relationships with their customers. Importantly, these new media vehicles make it easy to measure results and are often less expensive than their traditional media ancestors.
Do you have an employee with the talent and experience needed to identify the optimal mix of these highly popular new and traditional media? Is that employee skilled at creating effective executions for these important media types? If not, enlist the help of a local expert with experience in developing a marketing strategy and plan.
4. Re-evaluate your ad agency relationship. Are your advertising results meeting your expectations? Are the fees in line with the deliverables? Has your agency kept up with the evolving needs of your business and customers? Use a third party to assess the relationship and renegotiate the fees.
5. Use Public Relations. Share your story with reporters. Provide data, testimonials, and facts to substantiate your company’s superiority. Host a media tour of your operation. World class public relations firms aren’t necessarily expensive and can deliver measurable results. Let the Fourth Estate toot your horn, it’s more convincing than when you do it yourself.
Follow these five steps and overtime, you’ll reap the benefits of spending smarter by generating better and measurable results. Be bold. Be the company that took market share during the downturn.
Laura Sheridan is President of Viva La Brand LLC, an Ohio-based marketing & brand strategy and ad agency search firm.
