When companies ask themselves “How do we let customers know just how good our company and products are?” – the answer to that question, and the method of delivering that answer to customers, is through marketing. Making an all inclusive statement to the effect does absolutely nothing! Companies often believe that a single declaration is often enough. It isn’t. After all, every other company is making the same declaration.
So, how do customers determine which company is ultimately the best? The ability to distinguish the company’s product and service offering is through marketing. No other process delivers as concise a message to customers as does a solid marketing plan.
Does Your Company Need Help With Marketing?
If your company needs help with its marketing efforts, or is unsure of how marketing can help your business, then we’ll take a look at the importance behind marketing and offer up some simple rules about marketing success. It’s nowhere near as difficult as it might seem and nowhere near as simple as just coming up with a new catalog, website, blog or brochure.
Marketing takes the best qualities of a company – its engineering & design capabilities, its strength in customer service, its service excellence, its strong inventory and purchasing power – whatever the case may be, and puts that right in front of customers.
Why is Marketing Linked to Sales?
The number one message about marketing is that it is one and the same with sales. They go together. Marketing services sales by taking a company’s core competencies and delivering it to customers in an easy to understand message. It paves the way for sales to work on qualified leads. A good marketing plan provides sales with all the necessary tools to succeed.
If your business has good sales professionals, then they can be that much better with a stronger marketing plan. It’s this reason why companies with solid sales people turn them into excellent sales people by way of their marketing efforts. It's all about sales growth and customer retention. Here now are the rules to marketing success.
This video outlines five cost-effective advertising approaches. You can learn more by going here.
1. Don’t Cut Marketing During a Recession: Increase Your Marketing and Sales Efforts
The number one rule of marketing and sales success is to never cut back on those initiatives in a bad economy. Every company is cutting costs – including your competition, and to them, the easiest place to cut costs comes from marketing. However, companies often forget that in cutting their marketing efforts, they are also adversely affecting their service levels. Customers are just like your company. They are also concerned about the future, but they want someone who’ll be there for them in difficult times. In a sense, misery loves company and when companies cut back on their marketing efforts, they open the door to their competition grabbing market share.
A. The best companies grab market share during recessions: Many successful companies make their biggest market share gains and grab more customers in a down economy than in good ones. Think about it for a moment, it makes perfect sense. In a good economy everyone is jockeying for position, while in a bad economy, companies cut costs, drop their guard, retract their efforts and lose customers.
In a series of studies by ABP/Meldrum & Fewsmith during recessions, results showed that “companies which did not cut marketing expenditures during the recession years experienced higher sales and net income during those years, and the years following when compared to companies with cut budgets in either or both recession years”
B. Why do companies cut marketing during recessions and empower their competition to steal their customer base? It’s because these companies can’t properly ascertain the benefits and don’t properly measure the results of their marketing plan. More importantly, they don’t understand how marketing helps to lower their costs of finding and keeping customers! Why would any business cut back on the one service it must have to increase sales and grow business?
2. Reduce Costs, Improve Service and Increase Market Share With Outside Help
Sure, this second point seems like a pipe dream. How can a company reduce its marketing costs, improve its service capabilities and increase market share all at the same time? Well, it can be done and the vehicle many businesses use is to outsource their marketing to an outside marketing firm. Even companies with excellent marketing departments can benefit from different perspectives and fresh new ideas.
The mistake made by companies in recessions is to reduce their costs by cutting their marketing budgets and having nothing to replace them. By using outsourced marketing firms, companies can drastically reduce their cost structure and benefit from new and invigorated marketing efforts. In this case, a company can reduce its costs, improve its marketing ability and increase its market share.
3. Understand Your Company’s Costs of Customers
Perhaps the single biggest factor of business success is to properly manage your company’s costs of finding new customers. Marketing is the only tool capable of being able to control those costs and indeed, lower them. Your company’s product or service could be the best in the world, and everything your customers need, but if you spend too much money trying to find and keep customers, you’ll fail, regardless of the product’s or service’s gross profit potential.
It's essential that your company track its costs of lead generation. The table above is an example of what you might need to do in order to determine your costs of finding new customers. To read more, please go to: Does Your Business Know How Much it Costs to Get a New Customer?
4. Stay Committed to the Goals and Measure Results
Don’t just enact a new marketing initiative or use an outside firm and sit back waiting for results. Become involved in the process and include benchmarks for success by establishing goals and objectives linked to your marketing plan. For instance, if a company determined that it wanted to increase its market share by 3% year over year, how would it go about measuring this? Well, it could track the number of new customers monthly and review success by quarter. Make sure to measure the results of a given marketing initiative. Don’t sit back and wait for things to happen.
Marketing and sales success go hand in hand, and are forever one and the same. You can have sales success without having an in-depth marketing strategy, but you can never achieve sales excellence without a solid and effective marketing plan. Marketing is that one message you want your customers to receive.
It's your strengths in product design, your excellent pricing, your fantastic service, your distribution network and how your enterprise conducts business. It explains all your company's strengths and if delivered clearly, it will position your company front and center within your market.
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