I must admit I've been lazy with marketing in my business. I've let the products sell themselves, supported by word of mouth from happy customers and an occasional email newsletter.
Finding time for "proper" marketing is difficult when the day-to-day operational processes plus endless time-vampire surprises can totally throw a day into chaos. Customers needing help solving problems that are often outside our control (thanks, Royal Mail....) and large suppliers wanting us to do the work of implementing their crazy policy changes can take up extra-ordinary amounts of time and mental energy.
But it's time that changed. If a large supplier moves the goalposts too much... they're dumped. Customer issues still need to be a priority, but in most cases dealing with them all at once in a batch once a day rather than responding to each one as it comes up will still mean we're giving better customer service than our competitors.
That will hopefully make more time for proper marketing !
In order to do this, I need a plan. No more making email newsletters on the fly when I can find a few spare minutes.
Image by muneebfarman from Pixabay
Preparing the Plan
I'm not going to go into the fine detail in this post; to a great extent it's an outline of the principles, and something I can refer back to myself as I work through the process.
The first step is to brainstorm all the possible marketing methods I can think of. Newsletters, different social media channels, leaflets included in orders, promo codes, flash sales, print advertising, the whole lot.
With each marketing method, the idea is to look at a number of metrics and assign a score to them. These scores can then be compared to determine which marketing methods are likely to be easiest to do and have the greatest return on investment. It needs to be recognised that in most cases, the scores are a "best guess", as it can be hard to estimate the time needed to carry out a task that isn't part of the current daily routine.
Metric 1 - Setup Cost
This metric covers the cost in both time and money. It might be as simple as creating a few images that will be consistently re-used, or planning out a marketing campaign in detail.
But my experience is that so called "free trials" from marketing companies trying to sell software packages (whether it's a pay-per-click management program or some other piece of subscription software) are hugely expensive in the amount of time they expect you to dedicate to configuring them and understanding the results. This kind of software is never cheap, and is usually far too over-complex for small businesses to use to full effect. This is definitely a case where "opportunity cost" comes into play.
Metric 2 - Ongoing Cost
This one is a simple combination of the amount of time that needs to be dedicated daily, weekly or monthly to making the marketing method happen effectively, and the cost of any subscription services (e.g. email newsletter software providers).
The cost of month-end reporting, understanding the results and any required optimisation should also be included.
Metric 3 - Difficulty
It is worth assessing the difficulty of carrying out a marketing method.
Are you going to be dealing with some piece of software that is unintuitive to use, over-complex, or subject to regular updates that require re-training and adjustment ? Google Adwords is a good example in this category !
Do you need to budget time because the marketing method will generate queries from customers or spam from companies trying to sell you things because the marketing has put you on a list somewhere ?
Metric 4 - Expected Return on Investment
Probably the hardest metric of all ! The return on investment is likely to be just a guess initially and will need to be monitored and refined.
It is important to bear in mind that additional revenue generated should be based on margin not turnover. I've lost count of the number of software providers who want to charge £350 a month (why is it so often £350??), claim it'll make (say) £2000 of extra revenue, and don't get that on the margins we're on if it doesn't make closer to £5000 then we'll be losing money.
A factor to consider are whether the marketing method creates one-off new customers or ones who are likely to return over and over again.
Finally, if the method works as expected, what are the operational impacts on the business ? Will we need to change our processes, hire more staff, or ask for credit from suppliers to cover increased stock throughput ?
Metric 5 - Potential Show-Stoppers
This final metric is where all the unknowns go. It's very much a case of being on the ball during the planning and research phase, and being alert for things that might not have been considered.
Ones I've come across (but I'm sure there are plenty of others) include regulatory and data protection issues. Here in the UK data protection is (quite rightly) taken quite seriously, so if a marketing method includes gathering data on potential customers it's essential to ensure opt-in consent is gained and there is a secure data retention/deletion process.
The other key issue is that if you are dealing with a third-party provider of any kind (whether a marketing company or software provider), it is absolutely essential to get everything in writing and read the contract line-by-line before agreeing to anything. Salesmen will tell the most outrageous lies to get you locked into a contract.
The most common reason that I've walked away from proposals is contract duration. I've lost count of the number of times I've been told by a salesman that I can cancel with a month's notice and then discovered when I read the contract in detail that it's an annual rolling contract with a window of as little as three specific days when a cancellation is accepted to prevent them automatically taking payment for the next complete year.
Conclusion
While this all looks like a lot of work, especially if I'm assessing a dozen or more different marketing ideas, it is worth putting the time in to do this initial research.
By identifying the marketing ideas with the highest return on investment in relation to the time and cash cost, you can do those first. This would hopefully then create the resources to move on to the more expensive and time-consuming high-return ones.
It'll also help identify marketing techniques which should be kicked into the long grass. It's worth keeping the notes you make, because it is always worth periodically re-assessing any ideas you reject. It's just possible that something might have changed that makes it become viable.
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