Author: Jackie Cook

All too often, marketing is that thing companies do when they suddenly realise they haven’t got enough work in to keep everyone busy.

Even if you’re a manufacturer and production is in full flow, or you operate in a service sector and your staff are working flat out with clients, you should still be putting time and effort into your marketing strategy.

You should constantly be marketing your products or services, and raising the profile of your business in your local community so that in the future, you will have no problems in attracting quality employees who want to work for you.

Your marketing needs to be like an ever-dripping tap. It needs to be little and often.  So for example, instead of trying to write an annual newsletter, you should organise mini campaigns, on a monthly or quarterly basis – and supplement them with regular social media posts – for instance, weekly bulletins on LinkedIn, and daily comments on Twitter ( where the feed moves so much faster).

Look at planning monthly or quarterly themes for your activity across all media, e-newsletters, PR and social media. Host a seminar or an open day, exhibit at a trade show. But remember, the key is to have clear themes running across all your activity so that you are presenting a consistent message to your target market.

Another valuable tip is don’t be afraid to repeat the message, particularly on social media. It is fair to say that not everyone will see your posting the first time. In the case of some social media, the feed of what is coming through moves so fast it is gone in minutes.  There is a lot of hype around social media and indeed I work with businesses and directors on their social media profiles, and many businesses are somewhat nervous of it. I strongly advise you not to be put off by the jargon and to remember  it is just another communication channel and a great means of reaching your audience, in a more instant and direct way.

The key to successfully marketing your business, skills and services is to keep at it. It isn’t just existing customers and potential customers that see your marketing activity, but also your industry, suppliers, potential employees and the business community as a whole.

You want all of them to have a positive, up to date message about your company, one that accurately portrays what you currently offer.

Marketing is all about timing – of getting the right message in front of that potential customer at the time they decide to do something about the problem you can solve. But if you stop communicating, the customer may go elsewhere – as your competitors’ message may get there when yours didn’t.

How Should You Choose Your Marketing Company? It’s something you need to get right, or you are wasting your money.

Here are a few points to consider when choosing a marketing company that’s the best fit for your business and understands your customers.

First of all, who do you sell to?  If you want to market your product or service to businesses rather than individuals you will find your needs are different to those selling to consumers.

When you sell your products or service, you are selling solutions to your customers’ problems whether that is helping them to reduce costs or downtime, or increasing productivity and profits. The aim of your marketing should be to communicate your unique solutions to your target customers in the most effective ways possible. And your marketing company can help you to do this if they understand your business and your customers.

Marketing to businesses is a different approach to marketing to individual ‘consumers’. Consumers often buy based on emotion – because they love a particular brand – and they typically pay with their own money. ‘Return on investment’ isn’t usually a factor, and they’re not accountable to a Board of Directors or the Shareholders. As a result, brand and image-focused consumer marketing techniques often simply don’t work in ‘business to business’ markets.

In our experience, there are different approaches – those that focus on the client’s needs, and those that focus on their own needs. A marketing company that focuses on your needs will work with you to develop strategies for generating the greatest number of sales leads at the lowest cost. Those that focus on their own needs won’t talk to you about results, but may try to sell you.

You need to understand at the outset how long do you want the company to be involved, do you want to have someone design you some literature, write some copy or create a website and hand it over for you to manage?  or do you want a company to manage your marketing for you as you don’t have the resource in house?  Either way be clear in your contracts who owns the rights to your brand, literature, images etc or you may find you think you do but in reality you don’t control your own image and marketing material.

Always remember – you understand your products, and your clients’ needs, better than anyone else. Websites and social media, for example, are just a means to an end – the whole focus of your marketing activities should be on communicating the unique benefits of your products or services to your target customers.

So what is it you do in marketing?

A common question I regularly find myself answering… Marketing means so many things to different people and so often, all people see is the most obvious public face of marketing – the events, the PR and the business awards!

To do marketing strategically in line with the overall direction of the business, there is a lot more to it before you can even think about all of those things. The Chartered Institute of Marketing’s definition is “the management process for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably.”

So for me it is about understanding who your customer is, building a profile of who they are and understanding what is important to them, so you can understand what makes them buy your product or service. Until you understand your market, how can you develop your messages of what to say about your product/service, or where and how to communicate those messages?

The strategic marketing approach includes these steps:

Step 1 – Understanding your market. Conduct market research, which can include website, social media, industry and general media coverage, through customer surveys. Don’t forget about internal knowledge from your staff, particularly those who have been in your industry a long time. They will have a breadth and depth of knowledge and understanding.

Step 2 – Identify your strategy. Have you got an overall strategy? Growth? Which markets? Profit margin?

Step 3 – Prepare your marketing plan – this is your action plan of what communication activity you are going to carry out and when. Plan your campaigns around your product/service launch or your industry tradeshow. Be clear to set your objectives – are you raising your profile or driving sales leads?

Step 4 – Implement your action plans. Carry out your plans. That piece of PR should then be shared on social media and in an e-shot to existing clients and your target clients, followed up a phone call from the internal contact that has that existing relationship.

Step 5 – Report and evaluate results. Having carried out their campaign, many companies don’t actually report the results, or more importantly, evaluate them. Whether you staged an event, some PR, an e-shot or a social media campaign, you should be looking at the success rates afterwards. You need to know how many people responded and whether they were the right people.

Step 6 – Take corrective action. This is another important step many businesses miss, having reported the results, look at amending your campaign, time of day, where you advertise etc.

A few practical tips for best practice of using Linked In, for some of you it maybe common sense but you will be surprised what we see….

1. Create a headline that says what you and your company actually do Particularly in some sectors where the trend has been for companies to change the name to initials, it may help to add a strap line that says what you do. Same applies for your job title they can mean different things at different companies so again explain also use the summary and description part of your role to expand on this.
2. Double check your spelling and your grammar We all make mistakes but just think how it reflects on the quality of your work. If you can’t spell your job title right, for example, what impression does that give?
3. Good profile picture Use a professional head and shoulders picture so it is well lit, recognisable as you, current (tempting to use one from 10 years ago I know!), the right way up ( yes I’ve seen it happen!!). If it’s a good picture it will help people recognise you when they do meet you at that networking event with 100 other people.
4. Protect your personal information Yes Linked In gives the option to give your address, full date of birth and marital status but you dont have to complete it all. Your work address or at least town/city is good but your home address, particularly when combined with your full date of birth, leaves you too open to ID theft.
5. Recommendations Don’t recommend someone straight after they recommend you, it looks like “you do me a favour I’ll do you one” rather than a genuine recommendation. By all means recommend them but leave it a couple of months at least.
6. Add documents or presentations to your profile (since the autumn 2012 change to new personal profiles this has limited access) Using the Slideshare app you can add additional pdf’s or PowerPoint presentations to your profile. As a business owner or if you work in sales or business development then the obvious choice is the company brochure or presentation and any other supporting information about your products and services. If you work in HR then you might want add a careers brochure to attract future employees.
7. Add more than one e-mail address to your profile It’s not that you have to show them both on your account. Just imagine the scenario your primary e-mail address is your work e-mail address, you change jobs and because you haven’t logged in for a while you can’t remember the password. If you have a second e-mail account on there you can get the password reset and get back in. Don’t worry the e-mails from Linked In only go to the primary address so your not going to get umpteen copies of everything! If you don’t again imagine how complicated you are making it for people when they find you have 2 or even 3 profiles.
8. Personalise your public profile link It will help people find your profile both from within Linked In and when they run a standard Google search.
9. Edit your public profile settings You can control how much of your profile someone who isn’t registered on Linked In can see (yes I believe there are some people out there not on Linked In 😉 )
10. Personalise your website titles You have the option to instead of just putting ‘Company website’ and ‘Personal website’ as the links if you use the ‘Other’ if gives you another box to personalise so you can use the company name, name of the professional body, service line, networking group. For example, ‘CQ Strategic Marketing’ and ‘Linked In Workshops’. I hope these tips prove useful for you, I will be ‘blogging’ on some more advanced tips soon…so come back soon.