Effective marketing techniques

Marketing campaigns don’t have to be expensive and fancy to capture attention. Basic principles should be all you need to sell your product.

Most small businesses don’t have big marketing budgets, but any company can attain good results by sticking to the fundamentals of marketing for their campaigns.

Graeme Chipp, managing director of strategy and marketing company Growth Solutions Group, says businesses shouldn’t even think about marketing until they know who they are as a company. That involves understanding customer needs and checking out the competition. When that’s done, he suggests following a six-step plan.

“First, articulate the context of where your business sits. Are you starting up or have you been going for a number of years? What customers are you going after? Address the critical issues that come from that,” he advises.

The next step is to understand your unique offer to the market, what your business can give consumers that no other business can. Having established your proposition, you can set your marketing objectives, which could be anything from winning new customers to increasing repeat business. At that point, identify the action you’ll take to achieve those objectives.

“The fifth area is how are you going to measure it? Those measures might be financial or they might be around your brand,” says Chipp. “Sales and profits are good measures. Recognition of your brand is harder, it could be the number of people who come in with word-of-mouth referrals.”

Lastly, you need to understand the medium term implications of your marketing strategy, which feeds back into why you market, he says. “It might cost me money this year but, longer term, what is it going to do for my brand, my business? Can I invest in a new piece of equipment or am I going to put money down to recruit key people?”

The biggest mistake that people make is spending money on marketing without knowing why, remarks Chipp. “By doing all this thinking, people can be much more clear about what they want to achieve. People often jump to a solution—‘I need a website’—but they haven’t gone back to who they’re trying to communicate to and what they want customers to do as a result.”

For resource-strapped companies, Chipp says starting off small is fine. “You don’t have to get the whole bank every time, you can try something and if it works build on the experience and do it again and keep it fresh.”

Off & Online

Divya Hegde owns and operates Complete Radiance, a skincare salon in Sydney. Previously she relied on her shopfront to attract customers, but since moving to a less prominent location she has used other types of marketing such as the Yellow Pages, letterbox drops, and advertising in local newspapers and community newsletters.

“A letterbox drop can be effective, but the response depended a lot on the offer and the timing,” she says. Her way of measuring return on investment was to see whether the response paid for the advertising, plus extra.

Desiring a web presence, Hegde signed up with ReachLocal Australia, an online marketing service. “I was sceptical because other people told me I could optimise my website myself,” she recalls. “I wasn’t expecting it to be as successful as it was—by the time people called me, they were already 70 percent my client.”

Steve Power, CEO of ReachLocal, says the magic they provide is knowing exactly which search terms lead to phone calls, taking the online traffic to an offline transaction. “We know the top 1,500 words people use when they’re searching for something, even misspellings and slang terms. We then select the right words for that campaign. Our system puts a tracking number on their website, so when they call through to the advertiser we track the phone calls. The advertiser knows for every dollar they spend, it’s come from us and how much that lead cost them,” he explains.

“More importantly, we know which words generated the phone call. A lot of internet marketing companies say ‘we can get you a lot of visits’. We’re not interested in visits; we’re interested in leads. If I’m a plastic surgeon, ‘nose job’ might generate a lot of visits, but ‘boob job’ might generate the leads. That’s an important distinction.”

Hegde’s site picked up traffic from people searching for treatments, even if they had heard of them elsewhere. “I promoted one treatment, which had been promoted [via another business] in Cleo and on A Current Affair. People were specifically searching for that treatment on the internet, so I picked up 20 clients. Each client pays about $1,000 a treatment, so that was a big increase.”

Apart from having measurable results, ReachLocal also allows users to control their budget. They can spend more when they need to ramp up business, but pare back when they’re too busy or have less to spend. And, says Power, “you only pay when it works”.

Most ReachLocal clients are local businesses who complete the transaction offline. Power says they do geographically specific campaigns because they know that 75 percent of sales occur within a 15-kilometre radius and want to get the best value for their clients.

It won’t work for all businesses, he admits. “It’s not effective for businesses that don’t get a lot of search traffic, like ‘unicycle repair person’. And business to consumer tends to work better than business to business.”