Marketing Tips

• 7 steps for email marketing success
• The secrets to profitable marketing in a recession
• Do we need help with marketing?
• What is marketing?

More articles will be added soon.

7 steps for email marketing success

Email marketing is a key communications tool in the marketing mix for small and medium sized enterprises. If you get it right, it is cost effective, targeted, personalised, measurable and good for attracting and retaining customers. In the 2008 Email Census, email was rated the second-best channel (after search engine optimisation) for return on investment.

Your emails should be helping to build a trusted relationship, establishing your expertise and ultimately increasing repeat and new sales. The most successful emails combine valued content with short sales and marketing messages that have links to specific 'landing' pages on your website for more information. Regular contact with customers will ensure that they learn about your offering ready for future purchases. However, if you get email marketing wrong it can be an enormous waste of time, damage relationships and restrict the future use of this ideal marketing channel.

So how do you get your email marketing right? 7 important steps
are detailed in this guide. Request your free copy of the full email marketing guide here:

The secrets to profitable marketing in a recession

It will be the smart businesses that continue with the marketing process that will rise above the recession and succeed in the long term. Do not abandon marketing. Focus on the tips below to adapt marketing activities to maximise sales potential and minimise costs. Your competitors have not gone away! If cost cutting is inevitable, look at other areas of your business that can be streamlined and not negatively impact communications with customers.

By maintaining your marketing presence you will reassure customers that you are a stable and successful business to buy from, even in turbulent times. When the upturn starts it is proven that you will be striding ahead.

Read more by downloading this PDF quick guide containing 10 tips for Marketing in a recession.

Do we need help with marketing?

If your answer is yes to any of the questions below, you have nothing to lose by contacting us to chat it through. If we think you need a different specialist we are honest enough to say so!

• Have you tried marketing and thought it didn't work?
• Do you have some great products/services but sales are not what you hoped?
• Do you have some marketing materials but don’t really know how to use them most effectively to get sales?
• Are you unsure if your sales and marketing processes are the best they can be?
• Are you a business owner/Director who knows you should be using marketing to develop your business? Are you missing opportunities by delaying?
• Do you wish you could focus on your own job properly, rather than trying to wear a marketing hat too?
• Do you need a high calibre marketing person but don’t want to commit to hiring a full time person?
• Does the idea of having a marketing expert working a few days a month sound like a win-win situation? Affordable and effective.
• Are you wondering if marketing in a recession is the right thing to do?
• Do you find that you don’t have the time you would like to dedicate to marketing?

If your answer is yes to any of these questions, we can help.

What is Marketing?

Marketing is a business function that should be directly contributing to achieving your business goals. Marketing is often misunderstood and narrowly defined as 'advertising', 'direct mail' or 'PR'. These are infact just three of many potential marketing 'tactics'. These types of tactics should only be used after you have developed a marketing plan that is built on a clear understanding of your target customers. The marketing plan will include details of the marketing mix for a business - ie the combination of tactics that will work best.

The Chartered Institute of Marketing's definition of marketing is "Marketing is the management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably."

A business that uses marketing is customer-focused. This means knowing who your customers are, researching their needs and preferences (what they want) and communicating how these needs are better met by the benefits of your products and services, compared to your competitors, so that they are motivated to buy from you.

Successful sales and marketing projects require planning, initial investment and a team effort from across the business, to ensure all the activities are well delivered and results can be measured. It is vital to get your sales and marketing messages correct, have good quality data on existing customers and prospects and to have excellent sales processes to follow-up leads. All marketing activities should have measurement structures in place so that plans can be refined and improved.

The marketing mix can also refer to the 7P's - that is product, price, promotion, place (distribution/channels to market), people, process and physical evidence (tangible aspects such as premises, vehicles, staff appearance). A business must have a clear strategy for all of these areas. A company needs to know that it is marketing the right product to the right person, at the right price, in the right place and at the right time. For service businesses, its people, processes and physical evidence will also have a major role to play in its success.

It is very easy to waste marketing spend. Pearce Marketing will recommend the most cost-effective mix of marketing activities for your business. We can help you target your budget effectively to maximise sales potential and keep costs to a realistic level. This will ensure you have the best return on investment.