Why haven’t you started your marketing plans yet?
Or kept it going?

It’s a common occurrence that around new year’s or the end of financial year you start thinking about your business and marketing plans for the coming period. But you also know that it is quite a daunting prospect trying to get things in order. We discussed this very topic recently on our podcast – listen to the Procrastination ep here)

The fact that things aren’t in order right now makes the problem seem bigger than it actually is and can cause undue worry and anxiety.

Not having your marketing plans in place means you are losing opportunities and ground on your competitors. I know, I know I just started talking about worry and anxiety and then I follow up with even more doom and gloom – sorry.

And I will grant that you that anxiety about a task can lead to procrastination – in which case you need to take a holistic view and create a strategy that will give lead to success but also breaks your tasks down into manageable portions.

Don’t leave your marketing till it’s too late

A previous client had 6 months to prepare for one of the biggest annual events for their industry and whilst the physical attributes of their production were being seen too they continually pushed back the efforts on the digital front thinking that it is the easiest.

We ended up having to do a rush job for them and they still got a result but not the result they would have gotten if the thought and approvals had been there in a timely manner.

If it’s not the daunting nature of starting that has got you dragging your heels then there are usually three main reasons why you haven’t started:

No money

No time

No belief that it will work

To which I say:

Marketing Budgets

Having an appropriate marketing budget is key and by that, I mean a considered look at the finances but also how much X leads or Y conversions would mean to your business’s bottom line.

When you see a political party taking money from education to put somewhere else – you think to yourself “no, we need that shit” – well, marketing is the same you need that shit.

If you don’t have the budget for marketing or not factoring it in to your sale price then your business won’t last long. If it’s not – don’t buy that new car or other luxury item until it is – because getting your messaging out to your potential clients is more important.

No time to run marketing campaigns

Practice what you preach – when we were just starting out we actually had very little time on our hands – so much so, we would be making recommendations to clients that we hadn’t taken on board ourselves. For example, there was a good year or so where we were practically insisting that clients needed to update to a responsive website (one that scales for different size screens – PC, tablet or mobile). But we sucked it up and made the adjustment as soon as we could.

Marketing is a waste of money and resources

It’s not a waste of money – when done correctly marketing will make more sales if that’s the goal. Marketing, even carried out with a modicum of effort and strategy, is still not a waste. You will get knowledge and insight into the market place, your customers, what worked what didn’t; you will raise awareness, gain trust/credibility and build your brand;

Perhaps you have had a bad experience marketing previously, well if you have a bad meal at a restaurant then don’t go back to that restaurant as opposed to never eating again. Sticking with the same analogy of food as marketing – you might be a good cook yourself and by all means keep cooking but if you run out of time to cook and need a restaurant or if you don’t have time to shop or not sure what to cook speak to one of our expert team.

The proof is in the pudding – Marketing may be hard but It’s worth it – It is like Henry Ward Beacher said:

“It’s easier to go down a hill than up it but the view is much better at the top.”

So why is it that small business really struggles to market themselves?
And what can you do about it?

I deal with small businesses on a daily basis, and one of the things that I can tell you is that almost 90% of them have grown organically. They’ve done so via word of mouth, or with very little marketing foundation, in order to promote their product.

This leads to a significant challenge, when the time comes to try and grow beyond where they are – beyond word of mouth. It happens across two key levels of the business.

The first level is that any growth is going to require, in most cases, an investment in resources: personnel, equipment, product or whatever it might be and that is going to cost the business money. The second attribute is an area that most businesses have never accounted for, of course I speak of, marketing. And the margins in small business are often very compromised especially when they’re being eaten away by a new influence, such as an investment in marketing.

For businesses that have no platform, and have never marketed before, one of the key challenges that they face is the idea that they need to build momentum. And let’s face it, whether it’s running up the hill, or losing weight or achieving any goal the most difficult part is often just getting started. Once you have momentum, it is far easier to maintain it. Much like a cold room takes a lot longer to heat up than it is to maintain once the fire is roaring.

So the investment to make that momentum is often upfront. And that can be a scary proposition for business who don’t know whether the marketing that they are about to undertake will work.

And there is always some risk that your marketing approach might fail, however there is likely greater risk by not marketing at all. I think it was Stuart H Britt that said something along the lines of Doing business without advertising is like smiling at that girl you like in the dark. You know you smiled but nobody else does. So we have to get the message about your business out there and having dealt with so many businesses over a really long time, we can use the experience and insights we have learned to help design a plan that should make that smile shine.

And like most things, be it exercise or a diet the hardest part is often just starting. People procrastinate endlessly waiting for the perfect moment but you just have to get in there and have a go. Now, if you’re a large business with a large budget, it is often easier to forecast what the genuine return on investment will be because you are able to generate momentum immediately through volume of communication all of which builds a certain gravity around the investment that you make, but for small to medium businesses who haven’t got, the platform in place, or the momentum, often we need to pick a Normandy.

For those that aren’t familiar with this concept, Normandy was where the Allied troops struck the German army at the end of World War Two, the idea was that the allies would concentrate as much of their resources into a targeted attack in order to break through what was a significantly robust German defense.

Planning the assault – Marketing Strategy to make noise

And in marketing terms, we must identify a similar scenario seeking out a way to, despite the noise of the “market”, find cut through.

Our approach is to build an integrated strategy that identifies some core channels and some key messaging that we amplify to deliver a sales result. One of these core channels is
social media.

Social media has created a genuine opportunity to cost effectively reach an audience, and more importantly, to build a fan base or tribe. When you think about traditional marketing options, that really wasn’t the case. In fact, even large businesses that had built a fan base found they were often disparate and with no considered centralised connection. Social has changed that, which is why it has been a revolution for small to medium businesses.

Moreover, the digital environment has for the first time allowed us to accurately track and report on the engagement of “fans” and link that to sales and performance data.

This is an enormously powerful situation. But there are some rules to make this happen:

You need a plan
You need great content, written and visual
You need to be dynamic and respond to the audience to fully exploit “Your Normandy”
And, you need a proper budget that is aligned to your desired outcome.

And so one of our greatest challenges is actually educating SME’s in particular on making an appropriate investment in their marketing, because we often find people’s budget simply does not match their ambition. And they need to make a two to three year plan that allows us to build momentum, build the audience, and then mine that audience for sales.

And it is important to recognize that when I am talking about budget I am not just talking MONEY to deliver great marketing outcomes your commitment includes time to help bring this to life and one of the major flaws that we see, and this is not scale dependent, is that your agency is not someone that you just tell what you want to do. It is a partnership, it is a marriage, and you both need to be going in the same direction for a smooth and effective outcome. So what we would recommend is having some clear goals and objectives have a realistic view in terms of both what your team can invest in actively delivering the initiatives as well as having a proper and considered financial budget to match. If $5,000 could turn into $1 million on 3 months then everybody in the world would be doing it.

You would be shocked by the amount of times that I hear businesses say we’d like to make a million dollar sales. And we are we thinking $5 to $10K investment that is simply absurd.

But a 100K to 200K investment over 12 to 18 months might just deliver you results like this.

At the end of the day marketing is a gamble, but for the most part when you partner with an agency like us we have seen what works for many businesses, across many industries. You pay for that knowledge and experience and in the end it will SAVE you both TIME and MONEY.

So, the real question – is are you ready to grow your business???

If so please get in touch and speak to one of our expert team.

Is Social right for your business? It wasn’t right for Lush

Lush wiping the slate clean with Social Media

So, the big news recently was that Lush, the cosmetics company, have departed the social media space.

As a digital agency, you may be surprised to hear that I think that Lush may be just one of many brands that may seek to do this over time. I also believe, though, that Lush’s timing was about getting PR around that concept, as much as it was a genuine thought of we’re going to leave social.

They have probably generated more PR around the fact that they’re leaving the social space than they would have in terms of engagement in the social space itself of late.

Why did Lush leave?

Let’s look at why they might have gone –

Lush is quite a significant business with a global footprint. Hence, they probably do have both the resources financially and internally to manage a proper social engagement. But when you look at where social is going. The genuine reality is, it is no longer the cheap, free and easy platform that it once was.

To peddle your product going forward will become a challenge for big business and small businesses alike (Not that it is a challenge you can’t overcome but a challenge nonetheless).

But what a brand name like Lush does have is amazing owned-platforms in their database and website. It’s one thing that social media companies don’t want the average punter to know and that is that they own the real estate that you are conducting business on and you must pay rent to sit at the table.

So, Lush has done the numbers looked over their engagement rates and ROIs on email and website based campaigns and realised that it’s something that they can exploit to connect with their million or more customers.

Let’s look at social and what value it may provide to Lush versus the value of leaving.

I think the first thing is that, for Lush to compete at a high level as a brand would mean a huge investment in beautiful, well executed content. Now the question for a brand like that is does the brand awareness that they build in the social space have enough gravitas to pull customers into the stores, where they’re probably being led primarily by price, versus the value of their existing customer database, which is now quite extensive, in the ease of potentially converting existing customers to ongoing loyalty.

And I think when you look at it, they’ve made a decision that the cost of acquisition, and brand awareness is probably higher than their cost of maintaining or retaining clients through their loyalty scheme.

I think the second attribute, and this is one that many businesses really do need to consider is, websites have become the forgotten member of the family.

Think back 10 years ago or more when Facebook was, I guess in its earliest days, it wasn’t the tool for marketing that it is today. And most businesses invested heavily in having a really, really fantastic website, where they have a great deal of content for their audience.

Now, we do know that a huge proportion of the world’s population is hanging out daily on Facebook, Instagram, or even LinkedIn at a professional level.

Drawing that audience to your website, generically from a pure acquisition point of view, is not going to be simple for Lush but with the size and scale of their database… I think what they’re betting on is that they can engage people in their own environment, and have a free platform, in essence, to deliver whatever content they want.

And they don’t have to be concerned about trying to outsmart the Facebook or the Instagram algorithms to deliver that content to an ever increasingly noisy social environment.

So what’s the advice for your business?

The truth is that you have to look at it on an individual basis. So, if you have very, very limited opportunity to resell your product to a customer, or you have a very, very long repeat business cycle, then the database strategy, whilst valuable is probably too long term and not going to deliver you the results, you need to be a brand awareness and acquisition focused.

 

However, if you, like Lush, have a solid set of clients that are heavily engaged with your business, the reality is that you’re 60% more likely to resell a product to that customer, then you are to try and sell that product to a new customer .

The upshot is, if you are going to make an investment, once you have a word that I like to use gravity or momentum, then it can be really, really valuable to become more brand centric.

 

RT if you’re obsessed with the new Twilight Shower Jelly. 🤤📷 @lillindsaymac29 pic.twitter.com/NIZdWHJ8uu

— Lush North America (@lushcosmetics) July 23, 2019

It’s important to note that Lush’s US wing definitely did not close their accounts

So what’s the future for lush? And is that strategy long term?

I think the answer is probably it’s a medium term strategy. In other words, and what they’re doing is, they’re moving away from social so that they can really spend the limited budget that they might have remembering their repeat business, but everyone has budget limitations.

They’re using that limited budget to hone in on what they probably have seen in the data as one of the most profitable aspects of their sales funnel.

In time, that funnel will deplete naturally, because all businesses face the reality that their customers drop away. And at that time, this strategy will need to change. But for the Intermediate Period, it is a very, very valuable concept for that business.

So what do you do?

Well, like I said above, I think you need to focus in on a couple of key things.

How big is your database?

how active is your database?

Do you have any data around the value of returning business?

If you do, and it is all very, very positive then your business may just want to follow in the footprints of Lush.

If you don’t, it’s not going to work. But even if you aren’t going to go down a database approach, I would still be hesitant to suggest that you withdraw from social altogether in the way that Lush has.

And the reason is because it will be much harder to switch it back on again, I refer to this idea of momentum, if you’ve really given up on the audience that was loyal to you in that space.

And another aspect that can’t be counted out is that we often don’t know what might turn the tide on our business, changes in your industry, changes in the market landscape could really, really impact very quickly on how loyal your loyal customers are to you. And so maintaining an audience on a brand awareness level is important.

So that’s our take on what Lush has done, on why they’ve done it, and a little insight into how you might be able to use that tactic or not use that tactic for your business. If you’d like to know any more information about how we could potentially build a strategy for your business based around these concepts.

Please feel free to get in touch with me or contact any of my team we’d be more than happy to help.

 

 

hero image by tony webster