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DG Group - 7 Deadly Marketing Sins-Short
- 2. The 7 Deadly Sins
- 5. 1 Treating Marketing As A Cost
- 6. If You Treat Marketing As A Cost You Are Gambling With Your Business... And You Will Lose!
- 7. 2 No Marketing Budget
- 8. If You Are Not Budgeting For Success You Are Planning To Fail And You May Spend Recklessly
- 9. 3 No Specific Target Audience
- 10. If You Try To Sell To Everybody You Will Sell To Nobody
- 11. 4 No Understanding Of Your Customers’ Needs
- 12. If You Don’t Know What Your Customers Want You’ll Waste Money Trying To Sell Them Things They Don’t Want
- 13. 5 No Marketing Plan
- 14. Marketing Plans Are Documents That Turn Dreams Into Reality
- 15. 6 No Tracking Mechanisms
- 16. If You Don’t Measure Your Successes & Failures Your Marketing Cannot Evolve
- 17. 7 No Consistency
- 18. Inconsistent Marketing Delivers Inconsistent Results & Creates Uncertainty
- 20. Final Thought: The Essence Of Marketing It’s not marketing when everything goes right on the flight to London. It’s marketing when your people don’t respond after losing the suitcase that I checked-in.
- 21. Final Thought: The Essence Of Marketing It’s not marketing when the smiling waiter appears with the soup. It’s marketing when we can’t get served because he’s discussing his weekend with another waiter.
- 22. Final Thought: The Essence Of Marketing It’s not marketing when I use your product as intended... It’s marketing when my friend and I are talking about how the thing we bought from you improved our lives.
- 23. Final Thought: The Essence Of Marketing It’s not marketing when something goes wrong with my order. It’s marketing when the person who answers the phone empathises with my problem and resolves it quickly and efficiently.
- 24. Questions If You Want To Discuss Your Marketing Options Contact: Franco De Bonis [email_address] T: 01 835 8800 www.thedggroup.eu
Editor's Notes
- The DG Group is a marketing company providing a range of general and specialist marketing services. However, our approach is different because we focus on growth rather design/brand . Yes branding and design are very important, but if you focus on these you miss the key point of what marketing is about – making money! We therefore have a philosophy that we follow called “ Sanity Marketing” . In other words, will the activity that you are embarking help to deliver a return at some point in the future? If yes, then let’s continue, if not, then let’s pause and see why you want to do it.
- This presentation could be called “Marketing – The 700 Deadly Sins”. Today there are numerous ways to market your business and be successful, but there are as many ways to waste a lot of money! This presentation therefore takes a macro view of marketing without focusing on one specific type of marketing. It also outlines a methodology, which if followed can significantly help to increase return and success.
- Every business person has a conceptual understanding of what marketing is; But what is it at a fundamental level ? This definition helps to clarify it.
- Yes, marketing costs money, but it is not a cost; it is an investment in your business. Just like investing in a fund or a bank savings plan . If you thought that the risk of losing your money is too high, you wouldn’t invest. Marketing is EXACTLY the same. If you absolutely knew that advertising would not bring you any new business , would you still do it? Of course not - yet so many still do! If you treat marketing as a cost you’ll look to “save” money . You’ll let the newspaper “design” your ad . You won’t spend the time planning your marketing. You won’t review possible activities and plans adequately before putting your money down You’ll focus on the obvious – design, without looking at the important stuff – who’s it for, why do they want it, etc...
- We all know that customers can’t find you if you don’t promote your business But worse still, if you look at marketing as a cost you will never put the right structures and plans in place for success . You will never go through the required steps to identify the who, what, why, when & how This leads to wasted funds and over spend with little or no return , which creates the perception that Marketing is a “cost”. Make friends with your finance person The rule should be – Marketing should deliver at least a two-fold return on total costs (and that should be considered a failure!) But don’t confuse marketing with business essentials (business cards, stationery, basic website) but these should come out of your marketing budget. Ultimately, you will be destined to waste your money and time and your business will suffer .
- OK, so you’re convinced that marketing is an investment? So now you need a marketing budget. Not having a marketing budget is a sure-fire way to waste your hard earned money Without a marketing budget in place you have no limit on your spending From what I have seen, people who do not budget for spend do not track their spend – so they get a nasty surprise at the end of the year! A pre-set budget creates a framework within to work and it forces you to review (even if only quarterly) on what you have spent . But how do you budget? Use the 10% rule – Plan to spend between 5% - 10% of your projected revenue/margin. That sounds scary when you look at it as a big number But if you have been spending on marketing and review your total unplanned spend for the last 12 months, you’ll probably find that you either spent more than this or did not see the return you wanted . But was it effective spend ?
- A marketing budget is your roadmap/enabler for success We all know the psychological benefits of planning for success It is also your conscience and your get-out clause for pushy salespeople Without a marketing budget you are leaving your wallet wide open. Example – Tiling Company You are also literally planning to fail . Remember: you are not committing to spending it all at once and it can change !
- We all want to do business with everyone , but when marketing you need to be specific The reason for this comes back to the AIDA principle. How can you get and keep everybody’s attention when we all want different things from products and services? This is also fundamentally why most companies create multiple product lines . Even major brands and companies identify a specific “audience” to target They then look at the demographic and psychographic data about that audience and build their marketing plan around that. Even a small business has an ideal customer – you need to identify who it is You can then target your message and the type of media you will use to reach them If you are not specific about your audience you will place ads in the wrong places with the wrong messages and you will see no return Big companies are very scientific about this and spend millions on research and focus groups For small business it’s enough to just think about it logically and base your decisions on that
- It sounds counter-intuitive to “discard” potential customers But it’s all about focusing your spend rather than the scatter-gun approach It also forces you to think about benefits rather than specifications “ A warmer home that’s cheaper to run” vs. “A Rated Windows” As your targeting gets better and you start to see better results from your marketing you can start to expand to cover different targets
- Every customer has a need : Ease of use – Location – Benefit – Price – Safety, etc. Tap into that need and you have a sales message Not knowing and understanding your customer is a sure-fire way to waste money. In the world of corporate marketing they would run research and focus groups galore - Most of us cannot afford this, so what can we do? We need to talk to our customers ! If you’re coming up with a new product or service ask a small selection of your most trusted customers what they think about it You can even run a small survey of your own through your website or on the street! I am amazed how many business owners make decisions of logos/leaflets/websites without ever showing it to any customers! But even big companies get it wrong...
- If you don’t identify what your customers want or why they buy from you then you will : give potential customers the wrong message Or worse still try to sell them something they don’t want I’m not talking about selling them a swimming pool when they want a sandwich I mean missing sales opportunities because your message was wrong or wasting money because you were talking to the wrong target. Just look at the domestic cleaning fluid companies Originally they sold on the power of cleaning, then cleaning with a nice smell, now it kills 99.9% of all bacteria Look at washing powder companies First it was “whiter than white”, then it was “gets out even the toughest stains”, now it’s “Shifts the dirty even at 30” This is a classic case of knowing what your customer (or public opinion) is looking for Tap into that and your onto a winner – get it wrong and it’s painful
- Once you have a budget and you know who you want to target, you need to put a plan together Without a plan you will meander through your year simply doing things as the thought hits you Example Kitchen company Your spend will have no structure and so any budget you put together will be wasted A marketing plan is therefore a MUST But how do you decide what to do? Work backwards: First take your whole budget and work out what activities you can afford Now take your budget and spread it across the year by quarter Now think about seasonality and adjust accordingly Now drill down your quarterly spend by month Now match up your activities to each month
- Your marketing plan is the backbone of how you are going to achieve your sales targets I am not talking about a 200 page document, it could literally be a 1 or 2 page document More important is the time and thought you put into planning what activities you are going to run You don’t need to do this alone – there are lots of companies out there that can help you – mention Cohesion Marketing & Advertising
- All marketing is essentially a very big focus group You may have researched and tested your target market very carefully and still not get it 100% right. The best marketing companies have become the best over time This is achieved through very precise tracking and review of marketing spend and the impact it has had on sales The vast majority of small businesses never track this and so are doomed to make the same mistakes time and again How many times have you sat and wondered why your phones have stopped ringing when everything was fine before? Even successful campaigns become stale, but without tracking you’ll never know until it’s way too late So what do you track? Number of impressions Enquiries and where they came from Conversions Overall revenue/Margin Cost per acquisition
- Testing, measuring and adjusting is the ONLY way you can keep track of what worked and what didn’t Example Adwords Campaign (web design taking all budget) This does not have to take days of work You could use a traffic light system review key activities and spend vs revenue If everything looks good then green light and continue If it doesn’t look so good you have an amber or red light (dependent on how bad things are) All marketing will evolve – it’s important that it does But where can it evolve to if you don’t know what has and hasn’t work?
- Small businesses think that they can’t match the budgets of larger businesses So their marketing is done with no plan The outcome is Start/Stop marketing that might deliver a short-term boost to your bottom line, but no long-term traction – Why? Because 1 ad will attract people who are thinking of buying today A series of ads will build brand recognition in people who are not ready to buy today and trigger that memory when the time comes Of course most of us can’t run a 4-week television campaign, but remember rule 2 & 5 – Create a Budget then build a plan for what you can afford and plan it out for the year. It’s all about the Rule Of Eight – Studies have shown that Consumers need to see your brand on average 8 times in a short period of time before it becomes memorable
- So you’ve tracked your last campaign and things didn’t work out so well The natural tendency is to stop everything Be very careful doing this, you could harm both your bottom line and your brand awareness This will cost you more in the long-run It also creates uncertainty in your business as you can’t track long-term results and yoy seasonality figures, etc.