Marketing mix

Business Insider posted up this interview with twitter’s Chief Revenue Officer Adam Bain yesterday. If you don’t yet understand the opportunities for you as a marketer in using twitter as part of your marketing mix, this is well worth watching.

Some interesting case studies with VW and Audi referenced a few times, but perhaps most usefully is that the three advertising products available from twitter are explained in very simple terms:

1. promoted tweets
2. promoted accounts
3. promoted trends

Well worth 30 minutes of your time to watch this.

If you are planning b2b lead generation campaigns and haven’t thought about your sales funnel, it’s high time you did. For those new to the term sales funnel, it essentially defines the journey your prospective clients go through from the point at which you acquire them as a prospect, to converting them into a sale.

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There’s a lot written on the subject of planning in marketing and it’s clear there is a need for marketers to prepare a plan of action for any strategy or campaign. I’m a big believer in planning too and work with clients who use both six and twelve month planning cycles for communications, or with longer lead times for more strategic thinking.

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I love entertaining TV advertising. This one by Nike is a classic example of big brand advertising at its best – funny, carrying a message, memorable and so much more. But as a small business can you use brand advertising as a marketing tool?

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Email marketing is one of the subjects that is continually in the marketing spotlight. Done well it can reap huge rewards, done poorly and you can end up being labelled as a spammer. I’ve previously written about 8 top tips for improving your response rates, but when scanning the internet for more interesting hints and tips, I found a great post by an internet marketer called Gobala Krishnan.

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I had a poker night at home last week. I invited more friends than I could fit into my flat, assuming a couple would drop out. As you can imagine, I was quite surprised when everyone decided to come along. Great I thought, but then quickly realised I didn’t have enough chairs for them all. I didn’t have time to buy more, so I had to borrow some from a neighbour.

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When you run a small business you pretty much have to become a jack of all trades. You are the HR manager, the PR guru, the product expert, the guy in the post room, the sales manager and so on. This is great for variety, but unfortunately you will have to come to terms with the fact that it’s unlikely you’ll be good at everything.

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I attended a conference on Monday this week in London and I have to say it was excellent. It was all about innovation in the UK technology industry and I learnt a lot about what this sector feels it needs to continue to thrive. Good marketing, strong partnerships, appropriate finance, effective employment and retention strategies and much more was discussed.

As with most conferences there was an exhibition area running in the networking rooms. I’m a big fan of exhibitions, they can be an effective part of your marketing mix, but so often they are poorly used. If you want top tips for how not to get results / value for money then please follow these guidelines:

1. sit at the back of your stand checking your email,

2. don’t approach and talk to people looking at your stand,

3. don’t collect contact details for following-up after the show,

4. leave your handouts at the office,

5. man the stand with people who clearly aren’t comfortable being there,

6. spend your budget on giveaways with no clear call to action

7. design your stand for your your comfort and not for lead generation

If you follow this guide, I guarantee your exhibition stand will be unsuccessful and a waste of your budget. Instead, you could invert all of these points and make a real impact.

What do you think? If you’re going to invest the thousands of pounds it takes to hold an exhibition stand, you might as well get value for money.

For anyone writing a blog as a means of making money, it would be worth reading Daniel’s Daily Blog Tips blog. I especially liked his article that applies the traditional 4P marketing mix concept to blogging.

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Did you know it’s seven times more expensive to sell to new rather than to existing customers? I’m not sure where that figure comes from, whether market research or guestimate, but it’s an interesting figure none the less. With that number in mind, surely you want to be doing everything you can to keep your customers happy and where possible increase their expenditure. Right?

Well how do you go about doing that?

First of all and crucially, you need to supply a quality product or service that consistently meets your customers needs in the first place. It’s obvious that if you don’t it will be an even harder sell.

But once you’re doing this, how can you keep your customers happy and keep them buying? As with all good sales, there’s a huge degree of listening involved. It’s a well known fact that the best salesman are good listeners as well as good talkers.

Take the time to ask you customers how they are enjoying your product. Ask what they like and dislike, whether there are other products you could sell to them, whether they would prefer you to call twice a month rather than every week, if your product meet their needs or could it be improved?

What you want to know is, are you providing what they want, when they want it, in the way they like it. If not, what could you be doing better. Remember, good salesman are good listeners.

This doesn’t have to be an expensive process. You could issue an annual survey, check out www.surveymonkey.com for a free online survey tool. Or you could conduct a telephone research process with your 50 best customers. Alternatively you could implement an after sales service system such that your sales managers call all customers after a month and conduct a quick telephone interview. If you have lots of money you could even carry out focus groups to measure peoples experience of your product.

There are lots of methods available for listening to your customers. The important thing is that you do. Remember, it’s seven times more expensive to sell to a new customer than an existing customer, so do what you can to keep hold of them.

Image courtesy of Andrew*