Budgeting

Marketing, if not planned correctly, can become very expensive and be perceived as delivering little return. There are a number of marketing tools available and not all of them will be appropriate for all businesses. Finding the right mix of marketing activities to meet your objectives and that you can afford is key. 

When thinking about budget, you need to consider two things; firstly how much do you want to spend on the actual marketing activities, i.e. design, print, website, postage, and how much will you spend on resourcing your marketing activity. Most small businesses don’t have the demand or the budget for a full time marketing person but if you have other staff who have the right skills then you could enhance their role by adding marketing to it. Alternatively you may want to try and do some of the marketing yourself or you can use external marketing companies. Remember marketing is a long term commitment so whilst you might only require a few hours a week or month you need to ensure you can sustain the activity over a period of time in order to be effective.

Designing your Marketing Campaign

Having produced your marketing plan, agreed your marketing budget and identified the marketing tools that are most appropriate for you, you now need to pull all your knowledge together into a campaign plan. A campaign plan will detail the tactical activities that you will undertake to engage and communicate with your customers and prospects. This is the fun bit when you can put your creative hat on and brainstorm ideas around what messages you want to put across to each of your identified target customer groups.

When thinking about campaigns you need to focus on the benefits your product or service can deliver, avoid simply communicating product features. Then think about how you can turn these benefits into an appealing campaign.  What images do you want to use? Think about the use of language – are you trying to be funky and fun to appeal to a younger audience or do you need to use more formal language because you are addressing a serious legal issue? You need to think about how your ideas will translate into print, onto your website, in your advertisements and also how you might tell the story in a presentation at an event. Involve your colleagues or family and friends in brainstorming ideas, particularly if they fit the profile of your target audience.

Once you have your ideas and know what you want to say then you need to pull together a structured campaign plan which will basically act as a project plan detailing what you will do at specific points throughout your campaign. Set yourself tasks to do each week whether that’s sending out an email to one target group, or following up a direct mail activity with a phone call. Once you have your action plan in place, stick to it. Your plan should also include agreed review points so you can look at the effectiveness of your campaigns.

Keep your campaigns simple and make sure your planned activity fits into your budget and you allocate the resources to do it. The most effective way to start developing your marketing campaigns is to focus on one key area at a time, i.e. target a particular customer group or highlight one product. Over a period of time you can widen your scope to target other customer groups and products depending on your success. Don’t try and market yourself to everyone at the same time, the campaign will quickly become un-manageable. Besides you also need to consider that if you do a good job of marketing your business then you also need to be sure you can meet the increased demand for your products and services.

As that demand increases you can adjust your marketing activity, but don’t stop altogether. Maybe you shift from a sales generation campaign to maintaining customer communication.

Measuring Effectiveness

Finally you need to establish how you are going to measure the effectiveness of your marketing. No one marketing campaign will work the same for different companies so it’s really important that you decide how you are going to measure your marketing performance right from the outset.

Those measures will depend on what your objectives are; so if you are looking to acquire new customers then clearly one of your measures needs to reflect that. If you are looking to build reputation then you might want to consider doing a customer survey before you start the campaign to see what your customers think about your business, then repeat the survey 6 months later to see whether their perception has changed.

You might be looking to raise your online profile so you might want to think about measuring the volume of traffic to your website or the number of enquiries you generate from your site.

There are lots of ways to measure what you do with marketing but you need to be clear what you want to achieve. Most importantly, remember marketing is a long term commitment, so don’t expect all your goals to be achieved in the first month. Set yourself some landmarks to gauge your performance of a period of time. This is good practice as it will also provide you with insight into whether a campaign is working. If it isn’t, don’t just abandon it, try and work out why it’s not working and adjust it, maybe the message is not quite right, or the medium you have chosen isn’t appropriate. Marketing is a learning process and you will go through many cycles as you gain a better understanding of what your customers really want from you.

If you have found this information useful, you might also like to read “Marketing Planning” and “The Marketing Mix”. If you want to find out more about how Blue Topaz Marketing can help you with your marketing campaigns call Cindy on 07899 988979.