Last weekend I attended a two day marketing boot camp run by The Marketing Company and I thought I'd share the experience with you. Our goal was to learn how to create a scheduled 12 month marketing plan in two days. We covered many topics including what marketing is, how much you should spend, and measuring your marketing to ensure success. The course was intense but we all succeeded and I'm quite sure that I'll double my sales over the next 12 months.
There was way too much information to include in this blog but I thought I'd give you some of the highlights:
First, you need to write what you are doing in the following marketing areas:
- Marketing strategy
- Marketing planning
- SWOT analysis
- Competitor analysis
- Direct marketing
- Indirect marketing
- Unique selling proposition
- Sales
- Advertising
- Sponsorship
- Public relations
- Market positioning
Once we'd identified the above we then started looking into the different ways to market in more depth. I liked the Direct Marketing steps.
DIRECT MARKETING
Direct Marketing Pieces:
1. Clarify your target market
2. Build your mailing list
3. Create a mailing piece
- 40-60% = right list
- 30-40% = offer
- 10-20% = design & writing
4. Code your marketing piece
5. Test run the campaign
6. Run the full campaign
7. Analyse the results of the campaign.
The above method is very similar to Landing Page optimisation for websites. Most people think you build a website and then try and get on search engines but you actually need to construct and test the web page success first much like the Direct Marketing steps above.
FIVE POINTS OF CONTACT
Another important fact is that 90% of sales happen the fifth time a sales person contacts a prospect. Below is an example of how we follow-up with our clients.
Times contacted...|____1____|____2____|____3____|____4____|____5____| -->
Type of contact...|___Email_|_Meeting_|__Email__|__Email__|__Phone__| -->
Sales people......|____10___|____7____|____4____|____2____|____1____| -->
Out of every 10 sales people only 7 will contact the client twice but only 1 will contact the client 5 times. I learnt "Five points of contact" last year and implemented the above sales procedure (email, meeting, email, email, phone) which has been a huge success.
PUBLIC RELATIONS
Public relations is more than just sponsoring a sport team. It's how you interact with customers, suppliers, local media, community, former employees, competition and neighbours. This is very much like Saatchi and Saatchi's idea of Brand and how Love Marks are created.
Here's some simple PR tips for PR planning:
1. Objectives (business goals or your PR)
2. Positioning (how you will be perceived by all)
3. Key messages (core features of your business)
4. Strategy (how to achieve your message - target certain groups)
5. Tactics (tools used: articles, speaking, community work, etc)
INCREASING PROFIT
The goal of marketing is to increase footfall, spend, profit, repeat buying and referrals. We were shown a simple example of how profit can be significantly increased by increasing each of the above goals in unison.
If I have 1000 customers, who spend $100 and my profit margin is 30% on each sale and that client visits my store 4 times a year then my profit for the year would be $144,000. However if I increase each of those goals slightly I can have a far higher profit:
...............Before | After
Customers........1000 | 1100
$Spend...........$100 | $110
Profit.......30%(0.3) | 33%(0.33)
Visits/year.........4 | 4.4
Referrals.........1.2 | 1.32
_________________________________
Profit $144,000 | $231,913
Try it yourself:
customers x $spend x profit(0.3) x visits x referrals
CONCLUSION
I found the boot camp valuable and I know that it will increase my sales. If you'd like to know more about the course send me an email.
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