Make your marketing budget sweat!

The golden rule of marketing is to find out what works, and then do more of it. Here are a few basics that we have picked up over the years. We hope they help...

• Make sure your sales team know the importance of finding out where leads
  come from
  Believe me this is a problem for every industry that has a field sales force. When you have people incentivised to sell, and you present them with a potential customer, they won’t care where they came from... but they should. The key to providing a never-ending stream of potential customers is to know what got them there in the first place. Make sure they understand, take time to tell them, explain why it’s important, and if necessary tie their all-important commissions into this data.

• Make sure you are clear with your agency about what you are expecting from the activity when you first brief them
  Make these SMART measures (Specific, Measurable, Aspirational, Realistic and Timed) and hold your agency to them. Put some of their fees against the achievement of these targets. Offer them a bonus for exceeding these targets (you won’t believe the change in focus this can cause!) And make sure you reward them when they deliver...you will fast become their favourite client.

• Find what you can measure
  If you can measure it, you can manage it. Your agency should help you with this. It may be hits on the website, number of visits to the showroom, stock orders from retailers - whatever may give an indication of an increase in activity other than just sales. I have been involved in a few campaigns that, at first glance, had disappointing results, only to see a spike in sales or conversion rates a few weeks after the campaign ended. Of course the sales people will tell you it has nothing to do with the campaign, but by measuring some of the more peripheral data it is often possible to see that it just happens to be the time taken for the natural sales cycle of the customers to take effect. Not everything is instantaneous.

• Talk to your customers…
  ...all the time. I can’t stress enough the importance of this. It's all too easy to assume that you know your customers. It's also all too easy (and fatal) to underestimate their intelligence. I have actually seen a Marketing Director talk at length about the stupidity and ignorance of his audience when the profile of his customers was a like-for-like match with him! Just because they may be ignorant of your products, don’t assume they are ignorant full stop. Remember, necessity is the mother of invention and assumption is the mother of all f*ck ups. Don’t assume. Ask!

If you want to find out more about the tracking and measurement of marketing activity please contact Pete Hammond on 01372 372 372 or email peteh@phoenixplc.com