Before you begin - Marketing⁺

Before you begin – Marketing⁺ a collection of papers from PlannedSites for SME's

"A market is never saturated with a good product, but it is very quickly saturated with a bad one." - Henry Ford

Most of us have a cynical attitude towards expenditure on marketing and whether it’s worth it. A well-known industrialist once said “I know I’m wasting half my advertising budget. My problem is I don’t know which half.”

As a business-man you’ll be delighted to hear we don’t subscribe. You’ll be even more pleased to hear that we are aiming to make you a profit on your marketing expenditure – our research tells us that eschewing brand advertising of the sort you see daily in the national press and on television opens up plenty of other avenues to pursue.

To make your marketing pay you’ll need to know the value of a client. It’s the old Micawber thing: if you value a client at £5,000 and you spend £2,500 landing him, happiness. If you spend £7,500 landing him, misery.

Before you start considering your options, therefore, please go through the exercises in our paper “Value of a client”.

As they apply to all strategies you should also look at:

• “Must-Have Ingredient”
• “Testing and Measuring”
• “Process”

Don’t rely on one strategy. Not only may you be missing easy goals with other strategies, you may come a cropper. For instance, a business relying entirely on its Yellow Pages entry would be stranded in a year when there was a typo in the published phone number.

Finally, its essential to know your product, its strengths and its weaknesses.  Is it unique?  What makes it different?  What can you offer to differentiate it from the competition.  Look at your product from your clients perspective, what is attractive about it?

Don't be afraid to spend money on marketing, as long as it is in the right areas.