Effective Marketing for Your Business

How can we build effective marketing into any business?

What is effective Marketing? Well for most businesses (apart from huge global brands like Coca-Cola), effective marketing means lead generation. What you then do with those leads is your sales process, but for now let’s concentrate on Marketing in terms of generating leads within your target market which have a confirmed interest in the product or service you supply.

If we look at Marketing from that perspective there’s a series of stages we have to go through for marketing to be effective in generating new customers.

Research and preparation

1. Work out what your target market is and why they should do business with you.

Getting Active

2. Let your target market know that you exist.
3. Help your market understand what about your product or service they want or need.
4. Start generating some interest in your product or service and confidence that you are a trustworthy provider.
5. Help your potential customers to “kick the tyres” – to find out if this is the product or service for them.

How a business supplying manufactured parts to the Aerospace industry goes about this compared to a high street hairdressing business will be very different but the stages are the same.

Ultimately both businesses are looking to generate new customers that will value what the business does, come back time after time and ideally bring other people (or businesses) with them. The other element to this is the cost involved in your marketing. Effective marketing delivers new customers with a lifetime value to the business way in excess of the cost of attracting them in the first place.

So how can we go about building effective marketing into any business? 

Research and Preparation

The place to start is by working out your target market in as much detail as possible. We need to get specific here. If your market is Consumer driven, who are they? How do they shop? Where are they located? What’s the demographic you’re looking to appeal to? If your market is other Businesses, what kind of profile does those organisations have? Who’s the person within the organisations you want to speak to? What size of organisations? What geography? Until you get detailed and specific about your target market, it’s impossible to design your marketing to make it effective.

Next it’s about defining why your product or service will make your ideal customer’s life or business better. If you don’t know what this is, your customer won’t either. Again, this varies widely from business to business. Sometimes it’s about price, sometimes performance, sometimes image, sometimes ease of use. Understanding the value of your product or service and communicating it well is vital here. Everyone has a price–value expectation and disappointment when this ratio is out kills businesses.

Once you’ve defined who or what your target market is and why they should value your product or service, it’s about working out where to show your offer to the right kind of people. You wouldn’t put an Ad for skateboards in Reader’s Digest or one for hearing aids in National Geographic Kids for example. 

You’ll notice, we’ve not really thought about how you could reach people yet, which kind of media to use. So far it’s been about working out who, what and where. There’s another stage to go before we get onto the How too.

What does your business need to do to help people see that you’re the best option to get this product or service from? What will show them you’re the most trustworthy supplier of this product in the marketplace. The need to do this will vary depending on what it is you’re supplying but there’s still a level you need to find. For example, if I’m buying something that costs a lot of money that I want to use for a long time and that requires skill and experience to make well, I’m likely to invest way more time and energy in checking out the supplier’s credentials than if I were buying something with a relatively short life that’s basic technology and available for pennies everywhere. Think of the difference between a new build house and a disposable pen for example. The credentials you need to offer as a supplier of a new build house are significant. But even with the pen, there’s a level of trust in the supplier needed. If I’m buying online, will it arrive? If I’m buying in a shop is the price OK? Will it work? Will it leak in my pocket?

Finally we need to help people check all this out in as easy and credible way possible. Whatever media you choose has to work well and be appropriate to the audience and your product. Here’s the first point at which we start thinking about How to reach our target audience and how to have that market want to engage.

Getting Active

Some marketing strategies will work, some won’t and the ones that work for your business may not work for mine. The trick is to test and measure a series of marketing strategies and then ditch the ones that don’t work whilst keeping the ones that do. There’s a couple of caveats to this. Firstly, you have to give each strategy a proper go. That means measuring the return on your marketing investment carefully over a reasonable period of time. Secondly, have a long list of possible strategies and when you ditch one, add another. Continue measuring the effectiveness of each successful strategy as things change. Sometimes a change in the algorithm of a particular marketing channel can have a huge impact on your marketing results.

Once you’ve identified some options to test and measure based on the characteristics of your target market, add in all of the information and analysis from the work you did earlier. How can you make sure you’re appearing in front of the right people? What’s the impactful way you’ll get your target market to notice your product or service and understand what value it can provide? How will you show people your credentials? What’s the next step they need to take and how will you make it easy for them to take it? 

Finally, it’s about activity – how much you do and how consistently you do it. The best marketing campaigns can fail if they’re too limited in reach or if they’re inconsistent. Your numbers can tell you on average how many people you need to engage with to generate a lead – once you know this, it’s about having the discipline to keep doing enough work to generate the number of leads you want. So if you want 100 leads per month and 1 in 5 people you communicate with becomes a good lead, you need to communicate with 500 people every month. The numbers and the ratios will change but the principle stays the same no matter what your business does.

We work with business owners and MD’s to help gain clarity on their 2024 goals and beyond. If you’re struggling with where to start, why not schedule a conversation with us? It’s free and at the very least you’ll come away with a couple of ideas to help you move forward.

Alternatively come along to one of our upcoming business masterclasses or workshops –  Upcoming Events