Marketing is a process that leads to a controlled amount of enquiries. The principles of growth are ever so simple: one takes market share (from competitors) or makes market (expands the market with something new). Sales growth is a mix of new customers, customers buying more and customers buying more frequently – “conquest, basket and frequency”.
Making market is typically more difficult than taking it; sales growth from conquests is more difficult than addressing existing customers.
For the majority of SMEs marketing is something of a black art, but it’s really “just” putting your business in front of those who buy what you sell with the most persuasive argument – a combination of quality, value for money and availability.
Marketing should be driven from Board level and properly integrated throughout a business. We all know the principal of “supply and demand”. Think of marketing as the control of demand and operational capacity as the control of supply. Demand and supply must work and grow in harmony; too much imbalance between the two causes financial stress. This is why it is so important for business development, operations and finance to be directed, together, by a company’s Board. More here on the three pillars of an enterprise.
There is a galaxy of ways and means to win hearts and minds on the way to securing sales. There are media to consider (online and offline), the production of content (written words, images, videos), branding discipline, customer relations (not just chasing new ones, but developing existing ones)… There are more flavours of agency than one can shake a stick at, all promising ideas for future riches.
The costs of continuous marketing are rarely included in an SME’s business plan at the beginning, so when a need for “more demand” arises, marketing is an additional cost without a budget. Businesses require different blends of the above to achieve their goals. It is tempting to pick one thing as “the marketing” but I can assure you it will underachieve and lead to the conclusion that “marketing doesn’t work”. You need the right blend, properly directed into a continuous process.
One of the things a marketing director always does – in conjunction with their operations and finance Board peers – is optimise everything in the business to promote customer retention and referrals. They make sure the product or service is delivered beautifully and reliably; they finesse every contact with customers to make sure that quality, value for money and availability meet or exceed customer expectations.
Unless you have been a marketing director before – or could reasonably expect to be hired as a marketing director on the open market – you will not have the skills and knowledge a marketing director has acquired in their career. Marketing directors are not cheap, and their salaries are not where the costs stop – they run teams of business development people and are accustomed to deploying a marketing budget. Give them a team and a budget and amazing things can happen. That’s what they do.
Between wherever you are now and possessing a marketing department can feel like a chicken and egg conundrum: you need marketing to grow to afford marketing!
But here is an interesting business which offers the services of a marketing director on an ad-hoc or retained basis. In much the same way as SMEs benefit from, but do not require the full time attendance of, a chairman Proper Marketing provides the essential intermediate step of a marketing director on demand.
They are an extremely important interface between businesses that need marketing and the aforementioned galaxy of marketing types because they select the right types of marketing at the right time, and properly brief marketing service providers. This improves the results of the marketing which is good not only for their clients but also for the marketing service providers because otherwise, and it is too often the case, poor briefs lead to poor outcomes.
Their marketing audit establishes the marketability of a business, seeking out the ‘quick wins’ and adjustments that will make marketing more effective. They set out a strategy and formulate a managed plan with the right blend of marketing initiatives to achieve a process that leads to a controlled amount of enquiries.
If you’d like to discuss marketing, please contact me.