Marketing Fact Sheet

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To grow your business and increase profits you need to employ the most effective marketing techniques to reach your customers. Before you decide what methods will suit your business, you have to be able to answer some basic questions.

Have you made a marketing plan?
A marketing plan provides a guide to what you are going to do to meet your marketing objectives. It should include background information, marketing objectives, market research, competitor information, price analysis, target audience, routes to market, communications plan, timing and budget.

Identified your USP?
To give you an edge over your competitors you need to identify something unique about your product or service.

What do you need in your marketing mix?
Using the information from your marketing plan you should be able to identify the communication tools that will be the most effective, these are just some of the tools you can use:

Website
These days a website is an essential part of most businesses.
A well designed website can greatly improve your business, but you need to give careful thought to the type of website your business needs. Do you want to be able to up-date the content regularly? Will you be selling products from your site? How are you going to get visitors to your website?

Advertising
Always have a high impact, single, clear message in your ad. Whether you are using press, radio or posters you have only a matter of seconds to attract attention and deliver your message. And, never pay the full rate card price for your ad.

PR
Achieve free publicity for your company, if you have new product or service or a newsworthy story, writing PR is an effective method of communicating your message.

Direct Mail
Well-written and designed postal mailings with a strong call to action can be an effective tool to promote your business.

Email Newsletters
Interactive emails that link through to products or promotions on your website are an effective and relatively inexpensive way to increase visitors to your website.

PPC advertising
A well targeted Pay per click advertising campaign using relevant keywords for your business can immediately increase visitor traffic to your website.

Search engines optimisation strategy
Your website should be developed with a clear Search Engine Optimisation strategy. You should know the main Keywords relevant to your company and all of your text should be written with these keywords in mind.

Case studies
Your business success stories are an ideal way to communicate how you solved a particular problem for a customer and provide a showcase for your business. Write as many of these as you can and get them onto your website.

Referrals strategy
Satisfied customers who are prepared to comment on your product or service and recommend your business are a powerful method of converting potential customers. Are you getting enough of these and are you maximising their benefits?

Do you test and measure everything?
Do you continually test the effectiveness of all of your marketing activities? Do you regularly review your conversion rates to find out what is working and what is not working?

These are just some of the methods you could be using to improve your marketing and attract new customers. If you are not using some of these methods – and some of them are free – you could be missing out on thousands of pounds of new sales.


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