The most effective marketing is designed to create more sales, more enquiries, more leads and a greater buzz about your business. Marketing is supposed to make your potential clients notice you and encourage them to get in touch, to make a purchase, to remember who you are. Whatever your goal is with your marketing, you need to find a way to assess the effectiveness.

To avoid a huge gamble with your marketing budget and wasting money in areas which are not generating any revenue for you, split your budget over a number of different marketing ideas. Then, once you see how effective these ideas are for your business you can drop the ones that do not bring in profit and put more of your budget towards the marketing that works for you.

As an example, you might be a landscape gardener who wants new clients in his local area. There are various ‘offline’ opportunities such as advertise in the newspaper or local parish newsletters, you could deliver flyers door-to-door, you could form a partnership with a company offering a service that compliments your own – thus referring clients to each other.

One of the key areas that many businesses miss though are their online marketing efforts. As that landscape gardner you should have a website which is designed to capture the attention of your visitors and encourage them into making a purchase with you. It should be targeted to your local customers, so that when they search for you in the search engines – they can find you on the first page of their search results. The cost of this option is relatively inexpensive when you think of the income that it will bring back to the business. As an example, the landscape gardener’s website can be built by AntiSushi for as little as £99.95.

How many print adverts would you get that last for as long as a website?

Whatever you do, make sure you test 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.

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.

Question 1: What unique benefits does my product or service deliver?

A benefit is an outcome, something that solves a problem. A simple place to start with this is to list all of the features of your business and then ask yourself how each feature actually creates a benefit to your customer. Once you have your list of benefits you can then pick out the few that make your business stand out from the rest. These benefits make up your USP (Unique Selling Point).

Question 2: Who are my most likely customers?

There isn’t really a company in the world that can say their product or service is for everyone. “Everyone” is an incredibly big market to aim at, and very very expensive too. Think about who your product/service appeals to. For example, a product that appeals to a retired couple in the USA is likely to be very different to a product that appeals to a teenage girl in the UK. Try to define your most likely customers based on who can benefit the most from your product or service.

Once you have got a clear definition of your customers, you can then start to create a profile of them. This could include, which papers or magazines they read, which websites they visit, what is important to them, whose opinion matters to them and what other kinds of products/services they buy. The answers to each section of your customer profile will help you to understand where and when you should be marketing your business.

Question 3: What are the most appropriate marketing methods to use?

This is the point where most people actually start their marketing campaign. However, in a good marketing plan, it is actually the last point that should be considered. Since you’ve already answered questions 1 and 2, this question can actually be phrased even more simply: What are the most cost-effective ways of getting your message (Q1) to your most likely customers (Q2)?

These methods could include anything from direct mail via email or post, newspaper/magazine adverts, press releases, product/service trials, discount vouchers or just good marketing of your website so that you are found at the top of the rankings in Google or Yahoo.

Congratulations – Now that you have answered the above 3 questions, you have a marketing plan. You also have a very useful checklist for all of your marketing:

• Does this marketing idea let me communicate my message?
• Does it target my ideal customers?
• Is it cost effective compared to other ideas and my budget?

If the answers to these questions are ‘Yes’, then it’s worth testing your idea. If the answers are ‘no’, then you either need to ammend the idea or forget it and try something else.

We’re offering FREE marketing consultations to business owners, wherever you are in the world. If you have ideas you want to talk about or if you would like us to help you market your product or service, please book a FREE consultation today. We can help you assess where you are with your business and which strategies will help you to increase your sales and bring new clients to you.

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.

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.