Marketing law

For any of you with more than a passing interest in marketing law, you should visit http://www.marketinglaw.co.uk/.

It’s a service provided by Osborne Clarke – a leading law firm – and provides regular updates on the latest laws and their implications on your marketing activity. You simply have to register an email address and you’ll start to receive monthly updates.

While some of the info is not easily digestible to non legal beagles, they’re certainly worthwhile reading. Do yourselves a favour, don’t learn about law the hard way and be prepared – as Lord Baden Powell would say – to learn about marketing law.

The joy of testing

I’ve recently become a big advocate of testing. The idea that you should try out a marketing strategy on a small scale before rolling it out across your business. It’s a great way of minimising risk, while at the same time learning what marketing tactics do and don’t work.

An example could be with telemarketing. If you want to conduct a telemarketing campaign and decide your target list should be 10,000, then test your campaign on 1,000 contacts at first. This will enable you to evaluate whether this strategy will achieve your objectives, but also to refine your sales script and potentially improve your performance. With direct marketing initiatives it should also enable you to predict future performance, as success rates typically scale very well.

Testing can be used for many if not all marketing vehicles. If you want to use exhibitions to reach your target audience, plan an annual calendar of events to attend, but don’t invest in more than one or two shows until you know whether this format works. If you’re planning on running a paid for search campaign, trial it for a month or more with a limited budget first and than expand if it works.

Anyway, you probably get the idea by now. Whichever marketing vehicle you choose, test it on a small scale first. If it works, expand. If it fails, drop it and put your time and money into something else. 

Corporate social responsibility

Are you a professional services business? Do you want to make a profit but also benefit your local community?

If so, I suggest you look into ProHelp. A division of Business in the Community, it helps professional services firms to provide their services for free to local community groups and voluntary organisations. ( see www.prohelp.org.uk).

So why would you want to give your services away for free? Research has shown that businesses that take a lead on being socially responsible benefit from:

* attracting, retaining and developing motivated and committed employees (“78% of employees would rather work for an ethical company than receive higher pay”)

* winning and retaining clients (“88% of consumers said they would more likely to buy from a company that engages in activities to improve society”)

* increased networking and business development, (“2 in 3 businesses believe environmental responsibility contributes to a more successful business”)

* greater PR and improved reputation amongst the local community and target audiences,

And many more benefits.

If you don’t already have a community or CSR programme, have a think about what you can do to impact your local community. If you want to make an impact, I suggest you put a thorough plan together. Think about why you want to do it, what you want to achieve and how you will measure success.

You could also do a lot worse than simply contacting your local ProHelp office to find out what you can do.

** Stats taken form the Better Business Journey initiative from Business in the Community

Thinking inside the box

I hit a brick wall today. I wonder how many other consultants find themselves in this position, or perhaps, how frequently is a better question.

Have you ever heard the term to think outside the box? I’m sure you have. Just about every manager, business leader and guru has been using it for the past 5, 10, 15 probably many more years than that. People use this expression because it actually makes sense. Trying something new or taking a different approach to a business problem may actually help you to rectify the issue.

In marketing it’s an even bigger buzz word. Marketers are forever looking for something new and different with which to reach their audiences and make money. Whether it’s a new advert, or innovative delivery channel, or even a new product design. They realise innovation is a key component of long term business growth.

Today I heard a different approach, one that’s new to me. It’s called “thinking inside the box”. It translates to only marketing in the same ways that our competitors do – advertise in the same journals, gain publicity in the same press etc etc. I’ve no doubt doing this works, after all if it didn’t, then why would so many smart people invest their time and money in these ways?

However to my mind this is business suicide. Marketing should be multilevel and it should be innovative in order for a business to stand out from the crowd. But there’s no telling some people. I’m sure somebody once said businesses should “innovate or die”.

Just too much business!

I had an interesting conversation with a friend over dinner last night. He is working for a professional services company and has been overloaded with work recently. So much so, that he hasn’t been able to properly service his clients, leading to a loss of service and ultimately unhappy clients. Not only that, but it’s also led to him feeling a good deal of dissatisfaction with his position and a lack of faith in the skills of the management team.

So what’s been going wrong?

A common problem for many small businesses is simply the inability to turn away new business. I’ve been there myself a few times when I’ve won business, but as a result I’ve had to sacrifice service delivery to other, often higher value clients. It’s a very difficult decision for owners / managers, a balance between bringing on new clients and keeping existing.

What can you do then to ensure this problem is well managed? Well, think about the following steps:

1. prioritise your clients – ensure the highest value clients always receive an excellent service,
2. manage client expectations and push timescales out as far a possible – give yourself a chance to deliver a good product,
3. price appropriately so that new clients pay a premium – if you’re already at capacity you can then afford to take on contractors,
4. ensure you plan for the capacity to cater for new business as far in advance as possible – especially if your sales team is generating lots of leads,
5. keep some time aside as a manager to oversee any work going out for quality assurance purposes – remember people overworked and stressed may make mistakes,
6. direct the relationship with the client at a senior level – be proactive and to take ownership for any errors from the top, don’t let your team take the rap,
7. invest in your staff, give them the skills to provide an excellent service and to keep them satisfied.

Unfortunately this is a case of being too successful. Ultimately you need to provide a quality service if you want to get repeat business, develop a good reputation but also to simply get paid and avoid costly disputes.

Sometimes it may actually be better to turn the business away.

Corporate Social Responsibility – what is it?

To answer this question I refer you to the Business in the community website (www.bitc.org.uk) and in particular their guide to how small businesses can engage in responsible business practices (www.smallbusinessjourney.com/output/page407.asp).

Here CSR is defined as “Responsible business is achieving commercial success in ways that honour ethical values and respect people, communities and the natural environment. These businesses minimise any negative environmental and social impacts and maximise positive ones.”

That makes it fairly straight forward. In other words, CSR is about being successful in business but not forgetting your impact on society and the environment. You can take action at a base level by preventing any negative impact on environmental and social concerns, but increasingly you should be looking to add extra value as well.

Why? For the long term health of the planet and it’s societies. But also for commercial success. You can build PR campaigns around your work, improve staff satisfaction, reduce your overheads, improve you network and many many more benefits. Some large companies now require suppliers to have their CSR in order before they will conduct business with you – B&Q is just one great example here.

I strongly recommend downloading BITC’s Better business journey guide for how SMEs can improve their profitability through responsibility.

Income protection

OK, so this has very little to do with marketing your services, but it has everything to do with protecting your businesses long term health.

I visited a local financial advisor last week and he explained income protection to me. Basically, it’s a service that your bank, building society etc, will provide to help you should you become ill and can’t work.

Essentially, you pay a set amount each month to your financial service provider and in the event you become incapacitated they’ll pay you around half of your expected monthly earnings for as long as you can’t work – whether that’s one month, six months, or the remainder of your life. It’s effectively an insurance policy and the older you are, the more your premiums will be – as might be expected.

So if you are a sole trade, or run a small business, have a think about what would happen if you couldn’t work. Can your business afford to hire someone to cover your work, can you personally cover the mortgage payments. If the answer is no, then pick up the phone and talk to your financial advisor or bank immediately.

Public speaking

For many of us, public speaking can be a daunting prospect. This is mainly because we don’t really have to speak to an audience that often, perhaps the occasional wedding, dinner party or company function.

However, speaking at business events can be a fantastic way of marketing your services. You only have to attend a couple of networking events to see that those who are most confident in speaking and presenting their ideas grab the lions share of attention. And those that take the step up to presenting in front of an audience, are frequently those tied up with questions from prospects and partners during conference lunch breaks.

There are lots of reasons why you should consider public speaking for your marketing programmes. Here’s a few to get you started:

1. to develop your profile as an expert,
2. to increase your sales and partner network,
3. to gain FREE publicity in industry press and journals,
4. to reach targeted audiences,
5. to raise awareness of your company and its products / services.

And many more.

But you need to be clear about what you want to achieve before you get started. As with any marketing & PR programme, careful planning at the outset can increase the impact of your campaign. For example, do you want to reach companies that might be potential customers, or would you like to influence the investment community to help raise finance? Both can be achieved with careful planning, good research and a proactive approach to finding opportunities to speak.

Once you’ve started to secure speaking opportunities, you need to ensure you can deliver an effective presentation. For this, there’s no substitute for training and practice and more you do it the better you’ll get. Don’t be put off by nerves the first few times, this really will improve with time. There are lots of resources for speaking tips, just search on Google or visit your local book shop and you’ll find numerous.

If you want help identifying speaking opportunities, then you can engage a speakers bureau to do some of this work for you – although these mainly support celebrities or well known business gurus. If you want help for your business, then either contact me or your PR agency who may be able to help.

Direct marketing – when to communicate?

In advising a client about telemarketing recently, I was asked the question “when should we call our prospects to get the best response?”.

A very good question and unfortunately not one that I had a solid answer for. So I hit the books and put some study in to find out if there are any facts or recent studies completed that I could base our decisions on, but I couldn’t find anything. Stuck for info I approached the Chartered Institute of Marketing’s librarians to find out if they had access to any data I could use. The answer was an apologetic no, even the CIM is stuck for this kind of knowledge.

But I can’t believe there haven’t been any studies on this, especially with telemarketing being such an established and profitable business. So, if you know anything on this subject, please share it here. For small businesses this would be invaluable in helping them to get the most from their budgets.

However, some good news on email marketing. Rosalind Gardner’s Net Profits Today blog has a post about the best day to send marketing messages via email. She concludes that it’s different depending on whether you are b2b or b2c. For b2b the preferred day for receiving email is Monday and for b2c it’s a Thursday. However for b2c, Saturday and Sunday are also both very good days.

In terms of response, email marketers have been achieving between 32-38% open rates and 4-5% click rates for both b2b and b2c. I.e. for every 100 emails sent, around 35 people will actually open the email and 4-5 will click on a link to visit your website. How many of those convert to sales is dependent on your product and site design. For more info on this data, cut and past the link below into your browser.

(http://www.netprofitstoday.com/
blog/index.php/archives/2006/10/13/
the-best-day-to-send-marketing-messages/)

In terms of telemarketing, we decided to test various times of the day to evaluate when our targets were most responsive. Based on the test, we would evaluate the overall likely success of the campaign, as well as the most successful time of day.

Update on blog experiment

I also want to add that my blog experiment has already provided one potential new business avenue. That’s around two weeks into the test which is very interesting. However, it has taken a good amount of time to write the posts and also to keep reading and contributing to the blogosphere. Much like any other marketing activity it takes time, money and effort.