Would you prepare for a holiday in the same way you plan your marketing?

Is your view of marketing restricted to the promotional and advertising pigeon hole or do you view it as one of the most important business processes that take you from A to B. If it’s the former try thinking about a camping holiday to France.

Before booking the holiday you will no doubt look at things like finances, who’s going, how long you plan to be away and where in France you will be staying. There may well be discussions about which member of the family is responsible for what items you are taking and making sure all is packed.  We then have the car to check, oil, water, tyres etc. Once you have all that in place you can turn to how you plan to get to your chosen destination. It could be that you decide to stop at various locations and therefore the route will have to be planned to accomodate this allowing for possible adjustments that may have to be made along the way.

Once you have all that in place you can turn to how you plan to get to your chosen location.

Assuming that everything was checked and that everyone was prepared, the arrival at the chosen holiday destination should be achieved without any major disaster. However if the person resposible for passports or checking oil failed or had the wrong information then it could be by by France.

All of ther above can be applied to your organisation. The activities involved in getting ready for the holiday can be likened to the marketing processes involved in getting your organisation from A to B. You may have decided that at a point in the future you need to be at point B but before you set off it is vital to know where you are now and that everything is in place to ensure you can get there and that when you do, the neccessary things are in place to benefit.

The activities involved in getting ready for the holiday can be likened to the marketing processes

For a free one hour review of you current marketing visit www.dlhmarketing.co.uk

M & S profit up by 4.6% but marketing spend down 3.5%

The difference between branding and marketing…

On a recent visit to some sixth form students I was asked if could tell them the difference between branding and marketing but they set the challenge that I had to do it in a sentence. I had recently been reading some articles, one of which, by Mark McCulloch of Brand Promise Ltd.  had covered this very subject and a couple of his points had stuck in my head.  Although the article was a couple of hundred words long I was able to bring the points together into a coherent sentence.

A brand is a promise delivered. Therefore if your brand is the promise, marketing is the management tool by which you deliver that promise.

Marketing and colour – make sure you get it right,

what you want an audience to feel about your business. While visual appeal is important the colour

choices you make will be sending out a specific message to those who view them and you need to be

aware of what those messages might be.

Full article www.dlhmarketing.co.uk/usefulinfo

Marketing and sales working together

You have spent time, energy and resources to win a new customer, now you have to think about how to manage them. The process from lead to purchase from the customer will have involved a group of people responsible for budgets, influencing and decision making. It’s highly likely that now a new group of characters will come into the frame these may include production control, cost centre managers and product/service users.

Many organisations see this ongoing management as a responsibility of the sales team but is this really the best use of their talents?

This new group will include people who know very little about your company, product or service and will need educating. There will therefore be the need for relationship building activities to be developed if you are ti secure customer loyalty and retention. 

Many organisations see this ongoing management as a responsibility of the sales team but is this really the best use of their talents?

The goal of sales is to increase customer revenue. If they are split between revenue building and customer loyalty building you will be losing on both counts. By using marketing to develop a multi-media communication programme that delivers relevant, value based messages to the various individuals you will increase retention. Loyalty is a very personal emotion and the key motive of this strategy is to communicate and create the feeling of a real reationship with your company and not with a sales person who may leave over time.

You gain in two key areas. Your sales team are free to develop new opportunities both within the customer organisation and outside and you benefit from increased customer satisfaction. Not only are they receiving relevant information but members staff who don’t need to are not being required to see sales people unless they wish to.

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