Part I
Tools for Designing Great Marketing Programs
In this part . . .
Iequip you with tools and ideas for improving your marketing and boosting your sales. I also share the secret of successful marketers — how they find their marketing zone, the formula that makes it easy to produce growth and control marketing costs. Then I help you control your marketing costs and develop your marketing plans.
Need a marketing plan? Honestly, everybody does, but most people dread the challenge of creating one. Probably the best feature in this part is the template and instructions for preparing your own marketing plan in Chapter 2. I include a really cool set of templates: a Word file that you can customize for the text portion of your plan and Excel spreadsheet templates that you use for your sales projections and marketing budget. I must be out of my mind to give these things away (my competitors charge hundreds of dollars for template software like this), so take advantage of it before I come to my senses!
Chapter 1
Boosting Your Business with Great Marketing
In This Chapter
Finding the zone
Committing to low-risk, flexible marketing methods
Boosting your marketing skills
Examining the Five Ps: Product, price, placement, promotion, and people
Marketing with imagination
Reaching your marketing zone
Marketing can’t be reduced to formulas. Not completely. There is always a little magic in it. The magic comes from a mix of imagination, know-how, and experimentation. Gradually, as you work with these three powerful tools, you will develop your own formulas.
Did I say marketing can’t be reduced to formulas? That isn’t entirely true. Your marketing — the specific methods you develop to boost your sales and improve your profits — will eventually crystallize into a tried-and-true formula that works for you. But this formula will be unique to your business, and you can’t copy it from anyone else. In this chapter, I help you work on your formula — the formula that will put you in your marketing zone with reliable results from an efficient, effective marketing program.
The goal of this chapter is to put you in your marketing zone.
Finding Your Marketing Zone
Your marketing zone is the right combination of strategies and tactics to bring you all the business you need (see Figure 1-1). Finding your zone means exploring marketing options until you develop a formula that really works, a formula that you can rely on with only minor adjustments from time to time.
Figure 1-1: The marketing zone model.
Businesses that are in their marketing zone are able to count on a healthy flow of sales, which allows them to be forward thinking. These businesses are covering the basics so that they can focus on what exciting new things to do next.
For example, a dental practice has worked out, through several years of experimentation, a formula that is based on friendly service (from the person who greets you through the person who treats you), a good location, and regular customer contact via phone calls and postcards. These three elements constitute their marketing program. (The primary element of their marketing is their friendly service and great staff; the secondary elements are their location, calls, and mailings.) The practice knows how much it needs to spend to sustain this program and get consistent results. The business is profitable and successful. Now the practice can think about opening a branch office, or adding another dentist, or expanding into orthodonture, or any number of ideas that can grow the business beyond its current base. But until the dental practice had worked out its basic marketing formula and entered its marketing zone, starting any new initiatives would have been foolhardy.
How do you know you’re in the zone? In your marketing zone, you should find that
You get reasonably consistent results every time you use a marketing tool. For example, if you do a mailing, you should be able to predict within 10 percent how many responses you’ll get.
You operate in the black. Your marketing activities should return a profit. Successful marketing can be defined as any marketing that reliably returns more in profits than it costs to do.
You should know what your top three to five marketing activities are and how to do them well. And you should probably be investing close to half of your marketing spending in the single most effective marketing activity.
When you have satisfied these three requirements, you’ll know you’ve found your marketing zone. The searching is over! Now you just need to work on repeating the formula with small improvements and watch your sales and profits grow.
No formula works forever. Eventually, you’ll begin to find that results are slipping or profits are shrinking. If performance deteriorates, you’ll need to search again. Perhaps it’s time to alter your formula and update your plans. Should a new lead marketing method replace your old one? Do you need to make a major change in one or more of your top five marketing tools? Take a close look and be prepared to spend time and effort revitalizing your zone if performance slips and you no longer can say “Yes” to the three indicators described in the preceding list.
For example, Corporate Apparel Unlimited (CAU) of Anderson, Indiana, exemplifies a contemporary approach to selling customized clothing for team use and business promotions. Traditionally, such firms always used a color catalog as their primary marketing tool, with a call service center and smaller direct mail pieces in secondary place to support it. But when CAU started in 2000, it redefined the formula with a well-designed, informative, interactive Web site as its primary marketing tool. By now, most of its competitors have had to switch to the Web as their lead marketing tool, too. (See
www.cauinc.com for a great example of how these products are now marketed.)
Pinpointing Your Top Three Sales and Marketing Tools
If your business has been operating for a year or more, then you’re probably doing one or more marketing activities that work fairly well. Start by examining the methods that have been most productive for you so far and see whether you can refine them to make them work even better.
Your past experience is your most powerful source of information about what your top marketing tools should be.
Next, take a calculated look at other businesses. Start with your most successful competitors (but don’t try to copy businesses that are more than three times your size, as their budget puts them in a different marketing class and you probably won’t be able to afford to use their formulas right now). A good idea is to search for a successful similar company in another region and then study what they do. This approach isn’t out and out copying; it’s benchmarking (or learning from others’ successful examples), which takes advantage of the fact that ideas are free and anyone can try them.
Don’t copy the text or art of their marketing materials directly — those are copyrighted. Only benchmark general ideas — for example, if they use a large display ad in the Yellow Pages, try the same strategy with an ad of your own.
After you’ve examined similar businesses for marketing ideas, take a look at dissimilar ones. Sometimes the best ideas come from outside your industry.
For example, the owner of a small company that makes fishing lures was inspired by a friend who wrote a blog about business insurance and how to buy and use it. Nobody in the fishing equipment field was writing blogs, but obviously they were an up-and-coming marketing medium, so he started blogging and soon had more orders than he could fill. His blog became his lead marketing tool, and he supported it with a Web site, a traditional printed catalog, and a toll-free number for people who wan...
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