One of the biggest sins in marketing is ‘over-thinking’ your marketing strategy and spending too long planning everything. You could probably spend the next five years planning your business and marketing strategies out in full, but where will that planning get you, if you never implement it?
Nobody likes to sit and cold call businesses, or hand out flyers on a high street – but you need to take action and do whatever needs to be done to kickstart your business. If this includes making some phone calls, sending out a few emails, delivering leaflets/flyers to prospective clients then you should just do it. By implementing your strategies as well as planning them, people are actually going to hear about your business and bring in revenue to you.
You should always plan your marketing well, but never let your planning become an excuse for you not doing something or not taking action.
This is a new series of Marketing Tips, aimed at helping small business owners to gain new clients, increase their profits and generate more income. We aim to share at least one tip with you each week. These tips are taken from our eBook “Simple Marketing Ideas: Volume 1″, which you can get for free by signing up to our Newsletter on the right —>
Create A Plan And Checklist
Everywhere we go in business, people ask us to write plans and lists. Everything from a business plan to a financial plan or a marketing plan. If you were to create every single plan that you were told to do, you’d likely end up spending the rest of your life planning and never actually get any work done.
At AntiSushi, we’re very big on practical marketing and we like to make sure that your marketing delivers the best possible return on your investment. Without having even a simple marketing plan for your business, you will end up wasting your money and promotional efforts, meaning that you have to sell even more products or even more hours of services to make up for your loss.
It’s actually quite easy to create a marketing plan. All you need to do is answer 3 key questions.
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Are you currently receiving enough traffic to your website and is it converting into sales and income for your business?
With the credit crunch and poor state of the global economy worldwide, many business owners are struggling to ensure that they are getting enough traffic to their websites and into their business, meaning that they are losing out on sales and income.
The Christmas period is a very important time for all of us, as it’s a chance to push promotional ideas, products and services as well as spending time with our loved ones and having a little break from work. But remember — January is not far away, and it’s a month that traditionally will make or break many businesses.
Consumers will have less money to spend on products/services, so will need to be encouraged to spend with you via your website offers. This means you need to have an attractive website, good content and a “call to action” on each page, to encourage that purchase from your visitor. Likewise, advertising budgets for businesses are becoming more strained and it really is time to think more about what you will actually get for your advertising spend. Is that £1000+ Yellow Pages advert, really worth it?
At AntiSushi, we encourage businesses to rethink their online marketing strategies so that they can deliver effective and quality results. Of course we understand that traditional print advertising is important, but when you compare the costs on each for gaining the new customer, online advertising wins hands down every time. Take this example…
E.g. “Mr Smith is a Plumber based in Chichester, West Sussex”
Option 1: Yellow Pages advert – £1000 per year, Local newspaper advert – £50 per week, Friday-Ad advert – £25 per week. Total spend: £4900 (a very conservative estimate).
Local customers will use the above forms of print media, however it is debatable as to the actual number of people reached using each format. The Yellow Pages can often be found to be rarely used in homes these days, with the Internet taking a big precedence for consumers. Also, many consumers like to read the company website’s before making a purchase – looking for testimonials and previous work as examples of the quality and professionalism that they should expect.
Option 2: AntiSushi Marketing Campaign Plan – £250-500 (one-off), £50 management fee monthly. Total spend: £850-1100
This would cover a business the size of a plumber with perhaps 1-5 employees, very easily. For the price shown above, AntiSushi would provide a full review of the plumber’s current website and optimise any parts that need to be changed. We would then get the plumber’s website to the top of the local search engine results, ensuring that when a customer was searching for a plumber in Chichester – he would be at the top of the first page. The monthly fee covers our work each month and also full reports and statistics delivered to you.
A few statistics on current local searches for Plumbers on Google:
There are 400 people searching for a Plumber in Chichester every month.
There are 560 people searching for a Plumber in West Sussex every month.
That’s a total of 11,520 or more people who are ‘pre-qualified’ and ready to spend as soon as they find Mr Smith’s company. If we assume that just 2% of these people actually purchase the service, that’s 230 new customers for Mr Smith during the year. These 230 customers would cost Mr Smith just £3.70 each, based on his advertising.
So which option do you think is better? What would you do with 230 new customers?
We are currently offering a FREE Consultation for your business. Click on this link to take advantage of this fantastic offer.
Welcome to the new AntiSushi website.
We’ve updated our website and are currently accepting new clients in the West Sussex area, across the UK and around the World.
We are currently offering a FREE consultation on your business and your current marketing methods. To take us up on this great offer, please visit the FREE Consultion page, fill in the form and we’ll get back to you by the next business day.
