Part 15 in a series of articles from Sales Through Service: How to make customers want to buy again and again and again (because you’re so ‘great’!) by Guy Arnold
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Issue Number 13 – Making your marketing effective
In today’s world of ever increasing avenues to spend your marketing time and money, it is becoming ever more confusing and distressing, and ever less productive in terms of return on time and effort, to find great marketing returns.
This is missing the point: the web will continue to increase and you will continue to be offered more, and more, and more routes, to advertise on the web. In today’s world of ever increasing avenues to spend your marketing time and money, it is becoming ever more confusing and distressing and ever less productive in terms of return on time and effort, to find great marketing returns….
… with ever diminishing returns.
So isn’t it time to get counter intuitive?
This is an issue that everyone is facing and everyone is struggling with. Indeed, it’s always been an issue since time in memorial, and Henry Ford famously said, “I know half of my advertising works, I just don’t know which half”.
Our research would suggest that the counter intuitive way forward here, is by using the Sales Through Service system to listen more and more to your customers, internally and externally, through your measures and feedback, and then plan your marketing using the Go the Extra Inch system, and filtering it through your customer’s real needs.
One of the best ways to market your business or product, is to allow your customers and staff to use social media and feedback sites to talk about you: now of course, this takes guts, a great and organised system and integrity to allow them to do this (and you will need to use all of the tools you have at your disposal to make monitoring this easy and effective).
I am not here going to outline all the tools that you can use, because everything is changing at such a rapid rate that anything that goes down in print today, will be out of date tomorrow.
Counter intuitively, you need to let go of your own marketing and advertising and let the customer and people take control of this.
How do you do this?
- Welcome feedback, good or bad, and publish it openly in every way you can.
- Continually use feedback to go the extra inch in any marketing activity that you do: don’t get hung up on what you have done in the past, because the past will not be an indicator of success in the future (particularly in times of great change).
- Make sure all of your marketing meets the customer’s real needs: a good example of this would be to produce helpful videos, audios, or e-books, that your customer can download for free, that will build customer loyalty and drive new customers to you, because your existing customers will spread the word to other people, saying how wonderful you are and what great value you give.
- Drive all of this obsessively and continually, because you have a great customer focused mission: of course!
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Next time: Issue number 14- Lack of Diversity and Innovation in your business
