FIVE Tips to Improve Your Marketing Results!

Marketing is basically how you attract customers to your business. If we want to get more particular, we might identify the four P’s of marketing (product, price, place ad promotion) in the definition.

Marketing has its ins and outs, especially if you go about it with no strategy or plan. Regardless of how you feel about it, it is important to your business success and survival.

Here are some tips to help you with your marketing.

1. Know your customer.

Who are you exactly trying to reach out to, in other words, what type of person purchases your products or services? An example would be my type of customer; Owner of a construction business for at least ten years, 45-60 years of age, 50% have a higher education and the remainder do not, doing $1 million to 4 million in sales, and feel tied to their business with little financial results.

An exercise to get started is to analyze your best customers to find a ‘common thread’ among them, such as, age, income, location, industry, education and so forth.

2. Decipher and document the full scope of all the marketing operations needed for your business.

No one person knows your business as well as you do. What is it that you provide to your customers? How do they feel when their project is completed? Remember, in most cases, people use emotion to decide to buy, do you know that emotion?

Examine all medias that you use to reach out to them. Make sure your message is tailored fit to those who you are trying to reach. The idea is to see and understand the full scope of what’s been done so you can determine how to map out a better course.

3. Build your message around your notes for 1 & 2.

Capture in writing their emotional needs and how you will satisfy them. Let your ideas fly as you will never know what works until you’ve reviewed your list. Sometimes you’ll be amazed on what ends up being the right idea.

Another way to impose your presence on every where is to be there. Go to breakfast at association relevant to your industry, sponsor activities in your local area, use the media to broadcast your accomplishments, offer a free weekly article in print media relevant to your customers. Sometime people need to see you multiple times before they will act. The same goes for your marketing. People need to see it more than once to act.

4. In-house or an Agency?

Keeping your marketing in-house means trusting a person or persons to follow up, the ones you trust and feel to follow through. In-house sometimes means better control, but not always depending on your team.

Another way is to hire an agency to do it for you. Is it an agency that has similar customers in your field or industry? Can they show you some of their work? Sometimes you have more than one doing specific tasks, such as, print media, cold calling, SEO, etc.Understand one-thing, outside agencies will take a little longer as they formulate specific targeting plans, messages, and execution of their plan. This is where in-house can be quicker.

5. Test and Track!

Last but most important is to test and track. By testing, we could send the marketing material to a select targeted group and track the results. You will have to run the approach multiple times to see its real results.

A few years ago I ran an ad in a national construction magazine. I knew and understood it needed to run multiple times. The first four runs of the ad provided zero results. The fifth produce 3 or 4 results, the sixth a good dozen, the seventh flooded my office with 700 queries.

By multiple runs of the same material, you know how many times it will have to run to get the results you desire. This will also help you plan a marketing budget for your advertising budget.

Results can be generated with a clear plan and strategy that will meet your expectations.