As we approach 2022, you are probably thinking about your business goals for the next year. Increasing sales is often at the top of the list and marketing is the catalyst to help you accomplish this goal. Marketing decisions are often phrased as:
- How will I grow this year?
- How can I keep my current customers coming back?
When you ask a marketing expert their opinion about such things, they’ll likely start discussing the various marketing methods available and guide you based on the type of business you run. But first, you have to make sure your customers have a good experience when they do business with you. Until you have a solid operation with consistently good customer service, marketing can be a waste of precious time and energy. Before you start spending your marketing dollars, you should have a solid plan. The first step is starting from the inside out.
Here are three important things to focus on:
1. Staff Training
Don’t underestimate the importance of a well-trained staff. When asked why they left a particular company or business, things like rude staff, staff didn’t know how to help me, staff complained they hadn’t been trained are almost always at the top of the list. Training will inspire confidence in your employees and can often times motivate them to cross-sell.
2. Location Appearance
If you run a brick-and-mortar business where customers visit, pay attention to the visual experience for customers when they walk through your door. Typically, you and your staff park behind the location or away from customer parking and may not enter through the same door as your customers. When you’re in a location every day it’s easy for the visual experience to fade into the background, sort of like background noise for the eyes. For example, you may not notice that the paper sign you hung 5 years ago at the register is now dingy and the corners are puckered. To help avoid things like this, walk through your location as if you are a customer.
3. Make it Easy
Never before have customers been so time-starved and stressed. Look for ways to make it easy to do business with you. Examine your operational process and determine whether or not it favors you or your customer. Look for ways to simplify the customer experience so doing business with you doesn’t feel like a chore. Common ways to do this include:
- In-store Signage – is it clear? Easy to read? Attention grabbing?
- Customer Forms – this is a common complaint amongst consumers. Is there a way to simplify or truncate customer paperwork?
- Products and/or Services – is it easy for customers to identify what they need or want? Do you have too many options or not enough?
- Payment Methods – do you offer easy and convenient ways for people to pay you?
Once you’re ready to wow your customers with an outstanding experience you can begin to tackle the marketing plan. For some businesses, traditional forms of marketing like print and radio advertising, neighborhood mailers and direct mail remain effective, for others it has long stopped working. Let’s focus on the 5 marketing tools that can benefit almost any small business.
Website
By now most small businesses have some form of a website because the internet is the number one place people go to find information. Websites are the most effective way for you to tell your customer base who you are, what you offer, your hours of operation and how to find you.
Some websites are considered online brochures, while others are more sophisticated and perform business transactions between you and your customers. The key is to keep your website fresh and appealing through frequent updates.
Email Marketing
Email can be used to market your business by sending newsletters or marketing emails that are triggered by certain actions (i.e.: when potential customers go to a certain page on your website or abandon their shopping cart on your website). Newsletters can provide useful information and keep your brand in front of your customers. This keeps you top of mind when they are ready to use your service.
The trick to email marketing is collecting data from your customers that allows you to effectively email them. For some businesses the nature of your customer transactions lends themselves to naturally collecting this kind of data. For others, customer loyalty programs can be used to collect the necessary information. In either case you have to explain to the customer that you plan to communicate with them on a somewhat regular basis and give them an “opt out” option as your email marketing transpires. Email is a very low-cost marketing method. Because the cost is so low, it requires very few customers to be generated as a result of it for it to have a positive return on investment, which we’ll get into further on.
Social Media
Facebook remains the #1 social media site. A Facebook page is a place where you can basically create a mini webpage for your business within the walls of Facebook. This mini webpage works very similar to your Facebook profile. A group page is very similar but instead of being for a business it is for a group of people that have a common interest. A great way to take advantage of groups is to create a group that is relevant to your business.
Clearly there are a lot of people going into Facebook every day, but this is not the only reason to consider it as a marketing tool. The real reason is that Facebook pages and group pages are free, you only need to set them up once (so they take minimal effort), and they allow you to repeatedly get your name in front of prospects. And there’s considerable marketing velocity that can take place with Facebook. Every time you post something on your page it will show up on everyone's news feed that "like" your company page or are "members" of your group page. Although the algorithms used by Facebook change continuously, when someone posts a comment on your page, it may be viewable to all of their friends on Facebook.
While Facebook remains the most popular form of social media overall, Instagram is becoming more and more popular. If you customers are less than 40 years old, you should expose your business on Instagram as well.
Google Places Page
This is a page that lists information about your business on Google Maps. Your contact information, website address, hours of operation, pictures, videos and even electronic coupons can be posted there. This is basically free and you set it up only once. Of course, if something about your business changes, like your address or hours of operation, you need to update your page right away. It will probably take one hour or so to set it up initially and then you have it forever. Google Place pages also often show up top of page on Google when people are doing searches that are either location based or when they include a city name in their search.
A Referral System
Referral systems are a great way to attract new customers. Referrals are effective because people typically trust other people in their social circle. Many business owners report their referral system as their best marketing tool.
Determining Where to Spend Your Marketing Investment
You should consider all five of these marketing tools in various forms and invest based on a Marketing Return on Investment, or MROI. Determining the MROI is a very simple formula.
MROI= Profit from Sales Gained
Less Marketing Cost
= Net Profit
/ Marketing Cost
Subtract your marketing costs from the profit you gained on the sales resulting from the marketing campaign. Then take that sum and divide it by the marketing costs to determine your MROI.
This seems like simple math, and it is for the most part assuming you can easily calculate your profit from sales gained. The trick is identifying the source of your new profit and attributing it to the right marketing investment. For example, your website is always “on,” whereas your email marketing efforts are scattered throughout specific timeframes. Asking new customers how they learned about you is a hit or miss exercise and the accuracy and completeness largely depends on the volume of your transactions and the method in which you conduct business.
It's best focus your MROI calculations on the sporadic campaign-oriented marketing efforts throughout the year. Measure your uplift in sales against periods when you ran a promotion or sent an email marketing campaign.
All of us at Gallagher wish you a safe, healthy and prosperous new year. Please contact Ashley Thomas if you have questions regarding your insurance, or if you are interesting in how Gallagher can help you. Ashley Thomas 918.764.1619 or ashley_thomas@ajg.com.