You’ve become marketing manager for a company with ambitions to grow bigger and you’re given a £50k budget to do it with. A company director told me he would spend it on a chauffeur to free up the time he spends in traffic to call customers or plan strategy. Not as daft as it sounds, management time is valuable. The other interesting thing is he’s open to trying something new and it’s all too easy to keep spending on traditional marketing activities that may not be working or giving you a good enough return on investment.
The biggest headache in marketing is not knowing how, where and at what point in the process you caught the customers’ attention.
Advertising works as far as the publication’s reach (you don’t have the budget for national advertising). Printed literature dates quickly and often ends in the recycling bin. You oculd spend it all on a marketing assistant who might then have holidays, sickness or better job offers.
There is however a marketing activity that will work for you 24/7 and give you unquestionable feedback and analytics. It will convey your brand values. It will keep products and promotions up to date. It will make administration and stock control run smoother and your life easier. It’s also the most controllable, if it’s working you can up the tempo, if it’s not, you can try a new campaign. It can reach endless new customers anywhere. It’s a shop window to the world that can transform your sales. We see that happening all the time.
It’s called Digital Strategy. Yes that includes an up-to-date website of course, but a website is not enough to guarantee sales, it’s part of a joined-up, thought-through online plan that starts with a competitor and market place analysis and incorporates good design, richer content, a technically robust, highly capable website and a year of intelligent online marketing support, at the end of which you will have more customers and know more about them than you ever did before. What better way to invest your budget?
If you’re a digital native, this will be a familiar language. If you’re a digital migrant (as in you were working before computers arrived) we’re still talking to and understanding our customers, that hasn’t changed. We’re just doing it in an efficient and effective way, through the internet.
You can find a chauffeur at butlerforyou.com or we'll be happy to tell you more about planning an online strategy.
Bill Wolff-Evans is Marketing Director at Infotex