January 30th, 2012 at 9:26AM

Your greatest marketing cost is reaching your customers and prospects.

WHERE ARE YOU SAYING IT?

Where are you communicating with your customers and prospects? Where can you reach them most cost effectively? What are they reading, listening to and watching?

You need to invest wisely and and measure your results by capturing responses to as many of your communication initiatives as possible.

Here are a few rules of thumb:

  1. Budget (Marketing as a rule of thumb is 10% of Sales)
  2. Media or cost of reaching the customer is about 75% of the Total Marketing Budget
  3. Reach (most small businesses try to talk with too many prospects / customers)
  4. Frequency (most small businesses do not repeat their message frequently enough) 100 customer x 10 times is better than 1,000 customers x 1 
  5. Continuity is important (most small businesses do not pursue the dialog for long enough! Rather than appear in 3 editions of the magazine or newspaper with a Full Page advertisement choose to appear in 6 editions with a half page advertisement. The same applies to digital media) 
  6. Media should drive the message E.g.. Do not make the mistake of producing 5,000 Brochures, first and then ask how will you get them into the hands of your customers and prospects!
  7. Just because you can get a great deal from the media (of any type) it doesn’t mean it is right for your business. Here are just a few examples of a lack of media planning:
  • Why is 2 Office Medical Centre on TV? Especially when there was no point of difference or area of specialty mentioned during the ads.
  • Why is a “general brand ad” for a Shopping Center on Radio? Again, as the advertisement on the radio would have reached the entire metropolitan area, this shopping center gave no reason why someone other than those in the immediate geographic catchment would bother getting in their cars and traveling substantial distances.
  • Why is a large B2B industrial company on Radio? Have they exhausted all other possibilities? I doubt it. Online Marketing, Social Media, Direct Mail, and the list goes on.
These media choices may have all seemed like great ideas to these small and sometimes large business owners, but that doesn’t make them right. These media choices may have been affordable but were still wrong!
In the 3 examples above each of these businesses has a very specific target market. This specificity is due to either their geographic location or their niche B2B Audience.
Their ‘mass media’ choice will not only produce massive amounts of wastage but is unlikely to deliver the best marketing return on their investment.

#reaching the customer#marketng cost#communicating with customers and prospects#cost effective reach#reach and frequency#media planning#media choices#marketing roi
January 18th, 2012 at 10:43AM

Why having a Creative Strategy is critical to your business?

The creative strategy is the translation of the brand objectives and attributes,
into communication that will:

  • Grab customer Attention,
  • Arouse their Interest,
  • Stimulate their Desire and
  • Prompt them into Action.

Having a strong creative strategy is more important for the SME which doesn’t have the corporate budget to drum in the message using the sheer weight of media dollars. An SME is also in a better position to develop a strong creative strategy:

  • Unlike a big corporate organisation, an SME does not have to deal with layers of management and political games.
  • In most cases there is no brand baggage.

Creative strategy is rarely used by businesses outside the large and well established Consumer Goods and Services; from FMCG to Banking, Retail, Telecommunications, Cars, etc.  B2B and Professional Services companies, and in fact most SME’s can benefit from having a Creative Strategy.

The creative strategy requires a CREATIVE THEME:
  • Provides consistency which is crucial in building memorability and trust with the target audience
  • Ideally, the theme is will be derived from or generate synergy with the brand name or the positioning statement.
  • Allows for development of more ‘creative’ communication, which also makes it more memorable. Creative themes achieve this by developing synergy between words and graphics and thus become more memorable.This means that you do not have to expose your target audience to your message as many times as you would otherwise with ‘average’ or less interesting communication, which means you can spend less money communicating with your prospects to turn them into customers.
  • Well communicated THEMES deliver greater marketing ROI because they go beyond features and benefits in the mind of the prospect and engage them emotionally as well as logically.

The more creative the communication, the more memorable and comprehensible it is. Which means that you do not have to expose your target audience to your message as many times as you would otherwise with ‘average communication’.

A consistent THEME that uses the name of the brand or its positioning or ultimately both will always yield better results in achieving the above objectives.

MORE CREATIVE = LESS FREQUENCY = GREATER ROI

4 notes #Creative strategy#creative communication#creative theme#SME's#SME#marketing ROI