2010 Marketing Plan
How to create and optimize your 2010 Marketing Plan? In past Webinars sponsored by OBCAI, we walked you through the process of creating the optimal marketing stratey. Our goal is to always provide you with a tried and true roadmap to support you in creating a plan that: (1) Builds brand equity to fuel your pipeline for future inquiries. Wouldn’t it be fantastic if you arrived at a solid point where your prospects are buying rather than you having to sell each and every time? (2) Drives leads now. Yep, building the pipeline is great but if you aren’t generating sales that allow you to eat “now” the pipeline is really moot. So, there will be a lot of focus on this area. (3) Generates maximum ROI. Our prospects and clients are still extremely cost-conscious. So, while we’re creating plans to drive in high-converting leads, we’ll also take a hard look at ensuring you are streamlining your costs to generate maximum margins and ROI.
Look back to help with planning ahead…let the numbers direct you. What worked from a media standpoint? What didn’t? Did you identify best practice from a creative standpoint? Where there any promotions that really enticed prospects and customers? And, did you really use any “calls to action” that prompted the prospect to do what you wanted him to?
Marketing: Basic Check Points to review… Now.
We talk with business owners each week about their overall business and the marketplace. Times are challenging and many companies are seeking advice from us as to how to drive revenue. Really, basic “good business practice” holds true time and time again. We just apply it to our marketing outreach. Here are 4 points off the top of my head.
(1) STOP THE BLEEDING OF FUNDS: SLASH all activities that you cannot quantitatively validate are
driving revenue. That means, review every single touchpoint of your lead generation and conversion process to ensure optimal execution at each point. Review media, creative, offers, call to action, sales process etc… Most of all, ensure you have established a core set of Key Performance Indicators that you live by and systems with which to measure. Profit margins are too tight right now for error.
(2) RETURN TO THE BASICS: Stop experimenting! All too often we’ll go into a business and run down our checklist of “must do” activities and find that they are not being done. For example: Do you have signage? Have you contacted the brokers? PPC program in place? Does your website feature your locations and have an inquiry form on each page? Is someone on hand at all times to answer phones and capture the tour? Is your center tour ready? Do you have sales letters in place to convert? Does your agreement reinforce your value prop? Are you reviving the living and raising the dead? Sometimes “doing the basics” gets boring. It’s more fun to go out with a “splashy campaign” or “test a new medium”. That’s great – we should aways set aside a certain percentage of our budget for testing. But, when resources are tight you must be absolutely ruthless in ensuring the bread and butter activities are done flawlessly. Read more
5 SMART Ways to Trim Marketing Costs
More Results - Less $
Streamlining costs is a critical component of an overall plan to beat this recession. We have a few easy tips to help you stretch your marketing dollars:
1) BE FOCUSED: Be assured, companies still need office space, meeting rooms, virtual offices, videoconference capabilities and business support services. There are people who are looking for your products, right now. Identify the key media sources where they are looking (on-line, classifieds, brokers, signage etc…) and ensure that you are there – all day, everyday. We’ll talk about the types of ads, call to action and offers that work another time, so start to identify your key media sources now.