It is therefore imperative that your business is ready to respond and has an up to date and robust marketing strategy. In this week’s tip of the week, Serial Entrepreneur Patrick White introduces you to Module 4 of the Business Growth Course, which addresses these very issues and offers helpful insight.

Find Out More About the Business Growth Course

Session 4: Marketing

A good Marketing strategy is at the heart of a solid growth strategy. In order to increase your revenue and profitability, you first need to understand your customers’ needs, provide a product or service to meets those needs and let your customers know that the solution they are looking for exists!

What you’ll be covering in this session:

• The concepts behind a Marketing-led approach to business and the POISE model of Marketing
• Contents and Structure of a Marketing Plan and how each section is relevant to your business
• Marketing Research—working within the process, different types of Marketing research
• Using Marketing Research tools and techniques
• Applying analytical tools to your Marketing Plan
• Understanding Buyer Behaviour and what makes people decide to buy from you—you’ll be shown how this applies to both B2B and B2C customers
• Classification and segmentation of customers according to type and buyer behaviour
• Setting strategies according to the current stage of the Product Life Cycle and planning for New Product Development and Launch
• Applying the Boston Matrix and Ansoff’s Matrix to your business to identify which products you should be offering to which markets
• Pricing Strategies—you’ll be shown 13 different short-term and long-term strategies for using your price to position your products and services in the marketplace; as well as in the minds of your customers, and to generate sales
• Channel and Distribution Tactics—selling via agents, wholesalers, retailers and other intermediaries
• Communicating your message and promoting your products and services through appropriate media
• Relationship Marketing and Business Development strategies for forging strong business contacts
• Creating your own Marketing Flowchart which illustrates how you will execute your plan

Find Out More About The Business Growth Course

Hannah McNamara from SME Academy (http://www.smeacademy.co.uk) gives an overview of how social networking tool and microblogging site Twitter can be used to network and build your business.

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Transcript

The whole world’s a-Twitter or so it would seem. Every day there’s a news story in the paper about a celebrity who uses it or about how twitterers have spread the news about an event.

I’ll be honest. I didn’t really get it. It looked like the biggest waste of time ever when I first saw is and after all, did I really want to know what someone had for breakfast or read details of their latest bowel movement? That was until I actually tried Twitter.

Micro-blogging. That’s what it’s called. You update your profile throughout the day with the answer to a straightforward question, “What are you doing?” You can post details of what you’re up to, links to the articles you’ve written, or share links to funny stories or interesting news and put just about anything on there. But that’s not really the point. The real power of Twitter is in the networking. It gives you direct access to people who might not otherwise return your email or have a PA send you a standard response.

When I started out on Twitter I added a few people I knew and then looked at who they knew and I was actually quite surprised that a lot of the people I knew, knew each other. I could see who knew who and who chatted to who. It seemed more instant and more interactive than Facebook.

From what I can see, if you’re thinking about using Twitter for your business it’s a great way of building your network and chatting to other people who serve the same sort of market with a view to collaboration, joint marketing, cross-promotion or joint ventures. Don’t treat your Twitter ‘followers’ as newsletter subscribers. If you do, you’ll come across as spammy and self-centred. Instead get to know them, share stories, comment on their status and generally just get involved.

One way to do this is to keep any eye on what other people are posting on Twitter and when you spot something interesting that you’d like to share with other people ‘Retweet’ it. That means you put the letters RT, then the person’s username in front of the post that they’ve just written and everyone who follows you will see what you’ve retweeted and where it came from.

If you’re not already on Twitter, it’s worth getting yourself on there – even if it’s just so you have a profile listed and nobody else registers your name or company name.

There are lots of useful applications set up to help you manage your Twitter account and if you’re already on Facebook, you can set things up so that your Twitter updates feed into your Facebook status so you’re not creating more work for yourself.

Happy Tweeting!

For more video tips and articles go to: www.smeacademy.co.uk

[END TRANSCRIPTION – 00:02:39]

Hannah McNamara from SME Academy explains 7 ways to improve sales in your business. Includes various sales techniques and marketing methods suitable for small, medium and large businesses.

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Transcript

‘7 Ways to easily improve sales – without really trying’

I’ve yet to meet someone in business who didn’t want to improve sales, so here are a few ways that you can do it fairly easily:

1. Up-sell
“Do you want fries with that?” is a classic up-sell. You catch people when they have already made the commitment to buy from you and suggest an additional item to your customer. Now this isn’t just a technique for product-based businesses because service businesses can suggest support contracts or training on an on-going basis to support the purchase.

2. Build a Database
Every day you have contact in some shape or form with customers, clients and prospects. The more you know about them, the easier it is to find ways to provide more to them and as a result increase sales.

3. Get permission to follow-up with people
If you spend all your marketing efforts on getting new leads and expect to sell to people the first time you contact them, you’ll quickly exhaust your contact list and your staff. Instead find ways to capture people’s details – ethically – and follow up with them.

4. Plan ahead
It’s easy to get caught up in the day to day running of the business, but take a moment to look a few weeks, months or even years ahead to try and anticipate what people will want from you and even more importantly who is buying. You may have a seasonal business and you need to take this into account and plan for when you’ll have stock in or be thinking about different offers you might be running.

5. Have a PMA – Positive Mental Attitude
Attitude can make a big difference in business. If you expect the market to be tough, well, you’ll find evidence that it’s tough out there – you’ll find evidence which supports your theory. If you know that there are people out there who are buying, you’ll do whatever it takes to find them. This applies to everyone in your business – not just your sales people.

6. Reward your rainmakers
Every organisation has people who work week in week out to deliver the goods in terms of bringing in the business. Make sure you they feel appreciated and recognised for their work, and this doesn’t just mean rewarding them financially – a sincere “well done” goes a long way.

7. Ask for the business
Stop skirting around the issue. Ask people to place an order with you and more often than not they will! Give them a reason to buy now. I’m not talking about dropping the price to close the deal, what I mean here is give them a logical reason that they should buy now for example – prices are going up next month, we have limited stock available, order now and you’ll get it by Easter, Christmas or whatever the seasonal offer is.

Of course there are many, many more ways in which you can improve your sales, but these are some of the ones that will give you almost instant results.

For more video tips and articles go to: www.smeacademy.co.uk

[END TRANSCRIPTION – 00:03:16]

Dr Patrick White from SME Academy explains how a little-known Japanese fishing technique can be applied to your business in a recession to improve results.

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Transcript

Hello. Today I would like to talk about:

‘Putting A Shark In Your Business’

You might think this is a really odd topic but I’m relating it to the recession that we are currently having; because one of the things I have learned, being old enough and having been through a few recessions is that it gives you an opportunity to really examine what is going on in your business and make some steps that will improve your business ready for the future.

I’d like to tell you a story that relates to this which I read not that long ago and it’s to do with a Japanese fishing fleet.

The Japanese, over recent times, had fished out all the fish around their own islands and therefore had to send their fleet much further afield to get the fish. Obviously they couldn’t keep the fish alive to get back to the market unless they did something about it.

So initially what they did was they put big freezers on their ships and froze the fish and then took it back to Japan.

However this presented a problem because the Japanese consumer noted that the fish did not taste as fresh as they were used to eating. So what were they to do about this?

So they took their fleet, took all the freezers off and replaced them with big tanks. When they caught the fish they would put the fish in the tanks, fin-to-fin, and let them wriggle around and try and keep them alive so when they got back to Japan they would have the fresh taste.

However after a while the fish stopped wriggling and would just go into a sort of state of frigidity. So when they got back to Japan the same problem happened; the local consumers in Japan said the fish still tasted like it wasn’t fresh. It still tasted like it had been frozen under the previous way of doing things.

So then someone came up with a bright idea of: “Why don’t we put a small shark in each tank? And the shark will swim around; he might eat a few fish but because the shark’s there the fish keep wriggling around.”

And when they got back to Japan it tasted still like fresh fish. So you’ve got to treat the recession like someone has put a shark in your business. And let it wriggle around until you find out ways to do things better and get the results you want.

Thank you. For more video tips and articles go to: www.smeacademy.co.uk

[END TRANSCRIPTION – 00:02:37]

Dr Patrick White from SME Academy explains how the principle behind providing your customers with fresh milk and boost business and differentiate you from your competitors.

Transcript:

Today I’d like to talk about the critical question – you may wonder what the question is. Well it’s quite simple; it is:

Why should customers deal with us?

You might have heard this term ‘Customer Value Proposition’ or ‘Unique Selling Point’ but it is very important in today’s world because we need to differentiate ourselves from our competitors because most products are now commoditised and most services are similar.

So we’ve got to try and make ourselves different and appear different to what our competitors are doing. How can we do this, you might ask. Well, it’s quite difficult but I’d like to talk about a little story which might illustrate the point.

When I first went into business I bought a hotel and the hotel was in a tourist town where there were lots of other hotels.

Having bought the business I suddenly discovered that all the hotels were charging about the same price, which is a problem in itself because the worst place you can be is in the middle because you’re neither at one end of the price spectrum or the other.

However, I thought: “How can I differentiate myself from the other hotels?”

The first thing I discovered was that in hotel directories the most expensive hotels are always listed first. You know the thing: 5 Star, 4 Star, 3 Star, 2 Star, ‘Bring your own tent’ type hotels.

So I figured that if I could make myself the most expensive I would be at the front end of the directory and more people would see me. This, you would think, is quite simple.

However, why would people come to me just because I’m the most expensive? I had to find other ways to differentiate myself from the other hotels in the town and so justify the premium I was charging over them.

Another thing I noticed was in most hotels when you book in they provide you with coffee and tea and they give you those little pottles of milk – you know, the UHT type ones?

Well my hotel was in Australia where milk was quite readily available and quite cheap and most Australians and other visitors that come to Australia do not actually like UHT milk.

So one of the things I hit on was that I would give every customer that stayed in my hotel fresh milk. So when you checked in we pulled out a jug of fresh milk. But that in itself was not enough; we had to add other things.

Another thing I noticed when I was booking into hotels was that people would give you your key, say: “Here’s your key; go to the third floor and it’s the second room on the right.”

And I would be there with my wife and children and be struggling with bags and everything trying to get up there. So one of the other things we did, once we had checked people in and poured the milk jug, we then took the people key in hand to their room helping them with their luggage and their children.

Another benefit of doing this was I could get into the room and check that the quality of the room was fine; that the cleaners hadn’t left anything there, that everything was in ship-shape.

So I would make a display of putting the milk in the fridge, checking the room, helping them settle in and then go back down to the reception.

What happened after this was that we got a reputation amongst a lot of people: “You should stay at this hotel because they actually give you fresh milk.”

So it was a very small thing. It cost me 40 cents to give fresh milk and got me a $20 premium on the price of the room. I had differentiated myself from the rest and therefore people started coming to me and often it was because of word-of-mouth.

What you’ve got to ask yourself in your business is:

“What can I do to differentiate myself from my competitors?”

- And then answer the question:

“Why would people come to me?”

Just saying: “We give good service, go the extra mile.” – Etc, etc doesn’t cut it because everybody does the same thing. Look into your business and find out what you can do uniquely that differentiates you from your competitor and then work on that strength and try and build more business.

Thank you.

For more video tips and articles go to: www.smeacademy.co.uk

[END TRANSCRIPTION – 00:04:34]