Meeting Topic
Introduction to Meeting Topic:
While you may be tempted to cut your marketing spend right now – DON’T.
As you prepare for this fortnight’s meeting, read the article from Phillippa Roil-Glendenning and consider sharing ways YOU are getting creative with your marketing at the moment.
Marketing in a Downturn By Phillippa Roil-Glendenning
Times are tough for businesses, and in tough times your marketing needs extra attention. It should be intensified, NOT cut back – which is a common mistake. When the economy is in tough economic times, your prospects tend to cut back on their spending; however, the same number of businesses all still vying for the prospects’ dollars. In other words, competition heats up.
This means that those who normally do paid ads will likely see an increase in the spend needed to achieve the same number of conversions; further, if they don’t increase their spend they’ll see a drop in results. Don’t stop your ads when you see this happen! This is when you need to closely monitor and optimise your ads.
During this time, large companies are going to massively increase their spend on ads to make sure they saturate the market. Again, don’t panic! They need a lot more sales than you do to sustain their business. You need to focus solely on you and your own results. Because those who continue through the hard times with consistent and strong marketing strategies (even without pouring in the extra money for ads) will not only survive the downturns but will recover and have greater growth on the other side.
So, what do you do if you’re not a major national or international company with heaps of dough to spend?
- Do a review of all your current marketing, look at your analytics and look for which tactics are bringing in traffic and what aren’t. If you don’t know how to do this, then get an expert that you trust to do a marketing review and plan for you. There are many marketers that will do this with the intention of you implementing the recommendations yourself or they can take over and do them for you. Just set clear expectations before you start.
- Focus on quality not quantity. You want to attract people who are legitimately interested in YOUR products and services – especially when it comes to liking and following your social media posts. Social media works on algorithms using those people. If you have people following you who are not your ideal customer, you’ll stuff the algorithm. That means you will need to do paid ads where you manually select a targeted audience to get any reach that will have any benefit to your business.
- Don’t partake in the “Let’s all support each other and like each other’s pages!” initiatives that you constantly see in Facebook groups. Why? Because if you don’t have a genuine interest in the pages you like and vice versa, you’re hurting the business not helping it.
- Personalise EVERYTHING. YOU need to feature in your social posts, website etc and have your logo on EVERY post. Maximise your opportunities for brand recognition. You want everything you post to be instantly recognised and associated with your business.
- Don’t despair about the big guys because in these times people prefer to do business with local companies and real people. Customers like to know that buying off you is going to help feed the kids, the dog and the goldfish. So let them into your world. Let them get to know you and your team as well as the business.
- Add humour! In dark times people love a laugh.
- Get creative and add more marketing mediums into the mix. Database emails, networking, flyers, local papers, etc.
- Remember BUYERS go to Google – they don’t jump on social media first. Social is for branding and awareness. Think about your keywords and use them to create content for social posts, blogs, newsletters etc as this will help your SEO (helps you come up in Google).
- On that note, if you have a set ad spend, consider moving more $$ onto Google then social.
Find out how Phillippa helps her clients here: http://www.prmarketingsolutions.co.nz/
Next Meeting Topic
Introduction to Meeting Topic:
You know you ought to keep in touch with your customers and prospects, and a regular e-newsletter sounds like a grand idea. But where do you start?
Lindsey Carroll from Outbox Ltd is a Chartered Marketer and Mailchimp Pro Partner and gives ideas on how to populate your newsletters, automation and news flashes.
E-Newsletters – A Great Way To Build Business And Grow Relationships
You know you ought to keep in touch with your customers and prospects, and a regular e-newsletter sounds like a grand idea. But where do you start?
To begin with, consider these Top 3 Tips:
- Be realistic and have a plan. Can you honestly produce a newsletter every week? It’s far better to have a monthly (or even quarterly) schedule and to stick to it. It gives you a format and ample opportunity to compile relevant and engaging content. Once you’ve decided on frequency, have a folder on your Desktop for potential material (ideas below.)
- War & Peace doesn’t make a great newsletter. Short and informative is good. Intriguing enough to click through to your website for the full story is better.
- On that point, you can monitor those clicks to gain an insight into your readers’ interests. Then you can tailor your content to offer maximum appeal. Click rate is far better to monitor that opens since Apple’s change in reporting in September 2022, when they report an open before delivering an email to Mail or devices.
What are you going to share with your readers? A few of the following ideas should give you a solid starting point:
- An article that’s relevant to you and of interest to your readers. That second part is crucial. Ideally, this should be written up as a Blog on your website with a hyperlink from your newsletter. If you’ve genuinely no news of your own then pick a news story or blog that applies to your industry and “piggyback” it – giving it your own introduction. Be very sure to credit the original source material.
- An offer, service, product or event that you’d like to promote. How about giving your readers an exclusive deal? Be sure to use a hyperlink back to your website so that you can evaluate levels of interest.
- News of a business partnership or a case study. How will this be of benefit to your readers? Remember to focus on that, rather than on how it’s of benefit to you.
- Recommend a great business. If you think that one of your suppliers is the best thing since sliced Vogel’s, why not tell your readers about them? The benefits to everyone involved could be far reaching.
- Meet the team. It feels good to do business with a real person, to know who’s at the end of the phone or e-mail. Help your clients get to know your business by featuring a member of staff in each newsletter. Maybe link it back to the About Us page of your website too.
- Have humour. The world’s a serious place. If you can share a joke and raise a smile then you’ll almost certainly brighten someone’s day.
- Automation/Welcome series. Produce a series of emails once your reader signs up, these need not to be time sensitive, but can save you the problem of keeping in touch on a regular basis.
Additionally, make it really easy for readers to find your contact details and key areas of your website. Design a strong template – easy to use and branded for your company.
An authentic e-newsletter containing genuine, relevant and fresh ideas can certainly have a positive effect. However, mass-produced mailers, pre-populated with generic and potentially irrelevant content, could severely damage your reputation and may even have your e-mails perceived as spam.
Learn from what others send you. Have a quick flick through your In-Box and pick out a couple of newsletters. Are they engaging? Do they interest you enough to “click here to read more”? Or are they a hard sell, written in a way that makes you feel like you’re being shouted at? Make a note of what you like – and what you don’t.
Outbox’s advice is: if you’re going to produce e-newsletters, do them properly – or not at all. Your first newsletter will probably be the most challenging, as you grapple with copywriting and finding suitable illustrative images and so on. But remember that there are people who can help you; you don’t have to do everything yourself. By all means, contact Lindsey at Outbox for recommendations.
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