 I don’t know about you, but over the last few months I’ve found it harder to stay consistent with my marketing. And I know I’m not alone.
When we were locked down, a lot of business owners found they had time to write and share great blogs that resonated with their customers. They had time to send regular newsletters and post more often on social media. But, since restrictions were lifted in the summer, these tasks have slipped down the to-do list and many people have lost the momentum they built up in their marketing. So if you’re wondering how best to reignite your marketing this December, here’s 5 things you can do today to reconnect with your customers this Christmas...  I’m often asked, “what can I do to speed up my customers in their buying decision?”
With very considered purchases, it might be 6 months or more between someone first hearing about you and them actually making that first purchase. In a small business, these months can be excruciating as you wait patiently for a call or email telling you they’re ready to take that next step in their buying journey. It’s tempting to want to try and speed them up, because you know they’ll get so much value from what you have to offer. However, it’s important your customer is allowed to make their decision in their own time. Here’s why:  This is a question that not enough business owners are asking themselves before diving head first into their marketing…
A lot of business owners know they need help and assume they need a consultant. But do they really? Or do they need a coach? So what’s the difference between the two?  It’s become almost a guilty pleasure of mine, trawling through the ads on facebook trying to spot the irresistible clickbait formulas…
Why? Because they’re so effective! And because anyone with any interest in marketing will be able to learn something from them. But first...  If you want to increase your sales, the obvious answer is to tell more people about your product or service. Right?
Well actually, logically, that’s the last thing you should do. As business owners, it’s almost instinctive: more sales has to come from more prospects, they come from more leads and they come from more inquiries. So that’s where I need to start.  Strategic marketing planning takes time.
And, if like me, you’re running a business, time is probably in short supply... It’s easy to think that it’s better to just get on and do some marketing, even if it’s not as effective as it could be, and work on improving it incrementally using an agile or ‘test and learn’ methodology. Taking time out of your business to plan can feel excruciatingly wasteful. After all, once you’ve spent all that time planning, you’ve then got a long list of marketing activities to do and even less time to do them than you had before. So can’t all this planning be skipped? Can’t I just work out my marketing strategy as I go along? Well… let’s explore that with an analogy.  Without buy-in from everyone involved in executing your marketing plan, you'll never be fully successful in implementing it. And I don’t just mean your marketing team here either.
Marketing should never operate in a silo. Their activities impact sales, customer service, product development, product/service delivery and operations and more. Your marketing strategy needs to fit within the context of your business growth strategy and work in collaboration with each departmental strategy. But how do you get buy-in from all these different people? Especially when you have people who are not at all familiar with how marketing actually works. Here are my top 5 tips…  Can you have a strategic not-for-profit?
I’ve recently been working with a couple of not-for-profit’s that have been looking to increase the uptake of their services. Since the business isn’t actually “selling” anything, we’ve been looking at how the buyer journey can be applied to help them achieve their marketing objectives. So, can the buyer journey model be applied when your customers aren’t technically buying from you?  Does anyone else have that drawer in their kitchen which is crammed with menus from all your favourite takeaways?
Have you ever thought about how you could use this marketing technique in your business for all those customers who have ‘filed you for later’? Now, I'm not suggesting you go and print thousands of leaflets about your products or services and post them through every door in the country. First, that would be extremely expensive and, second, it just wouldn't work for most businesses. What I'm talking about here is something which you can give to those potential clients who aren't really “hungry” for what you offer now, but might be in the future.  Your headlines are the first part of your marketing that your customers will read so they need to make them want to read on. How? By waking up their chimp and prompting them to take action.
But what do I mean by ‘waking up their chimp’? In The Chimp Paradox, Professor Steve Peters talks about what he calls the ‘chimp brain’. This is the primitive part of the brain which is solely geared towards keeping us alive. It’s constantly on the lookout for danger, and, as soon as it wakes up and realises that there's danger present, it takes action to protect us. |
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Ros Conkie is a Marketing Consultant based in Portishead near Bristol, North Somerset, UK
Ros Conkie is a Marketing Consultant based in Portishead near Bristol, North Somerset, UK
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