by admin | Mar 22, 2011 | Blog, Promotion
Most small business owners are continually faced with the arduous task of achieving more with less.
Finding, attracting and retaining customers on an ever shrinking marketing and sales budget is becoming the norm, which makes the investment that you make into your people – your marketing human resources even more important and why measuring the return on this investment is crucial to your success!
There are numerous advantages of outsourcing or using marketing contractors for small and medium enterprises:
- Staffing is kept lean with no long-term commitments, whilst resources are available immediately – when you want them! Outsourcing gives you access to experienced marketing professionals who can quickly develop plans and campaigns on the tightest of schedules. Furthermore there will be no ambition, career progression or mood swings to deal with! If for some reason the marketing provider doesn’t perform to your expectations, you have a personality clash (it happens!) or for any other reason, you do not have messy labor laws to contend with if you want to terminate them – in the words of one Donald Trump – “You’re fired!” is all that is necessary.
- It is far easier and much more likely that you will be able to hold a 3rd party such as a contractor, consultant or marketing / advertising agency accountable than one of your own team members.
- Salary is just a tip of the “employment costs iceberg”. Outsourcing to an expert, means that you don’t bear the costs of recruiting, training and managing the employee, no furnishing an office, buying new hardware or providing employee benefits.
- Contracting means cost effectiveness and a mean balance sheet – no annual leave, sick leave or long-service accruals.
- Outsourcing strategic marketing thinking and creative expertise eliminates the “we’ve always done it this way” mentality and helps eliminate bias associated with internal politics, which means higher productivity from contractors versus permanent staff who maybe hampered by habits, hiding behind history or being haunted by it and who maybe short on haste.
- Inject new skills into your business with minimal risk. Since media is increasingly fragmented, communications programs are more complicated. You can’t be an expert media strategist, a technology expert, a marketing strategist, a market researcher, a promotional expert, a designer, a copywriter, a project manager or co-ordinator, and the list goes on!
- The most valuable contribution a marketing consultancy or an advertising agency can make to its clients is their capacity to demonstrate a new perspective about a product or a service that people inside a company may not have. The best marketing consultants, those with experience across product and service categories, see similarities and differences in communication problems across different industries and help clients see problems better than they can see them themselves. They are able to draw on their experience across multiple brands and various categories and more readily recognise unlikely connections and hence more readily provide creative and strategic solutions that may not be self-evident to the clients themselves. Outsourcing marketing services especially those of a strategic and creative nature helps both the company and the consumer discover new ways of looking at the problem and the solution. It is one of the most cost effective ways of introducing fresh ideas (innovation) into your business.
- Outsourcing will help you to focus on the core competencies of your business; talk to the people that are on your front line – your customers and your sales team. By outsourcing your marketing you will be able to work on your business instead of in it and this will help you to maximize returns from your marketing investment.
A sample case study at the end of this paper will illustrate the superior cost effectiveness of hiring a contractor or consultant versus those associated with employing even a single part time in house marketing resource.
So you are still not convinced and in all fairness, there are times when it is more cost effective to have an internal marketing resource. The question is what type of marketing resource should you have in house? To answer this, let’s look at HIRING or EMPLOYING a marketing consultant in house.
[download id=”1″ format=”1″]
by admin | Mar 22, 2011 | Blog, Strategy
If we accept the notion by the grandfather of modern management, Peter Drucker, that “Business is about two things and two things only, innovation and marketing” and that people are in fact our greatest assets, then it would make perfect sense to deduce that your company’s marketing consultants are your most important and valuable assets. So much for theory, the stark reality of marketing as a discipline and a profession in the small business arena is quiet different.
Why is it so? Because unfortunately, for most small and medium sized businesses, marketing is an expense and not an investment. Most small business owners do not understand the meaning of marketing or branding let alone have any basic understanding of advertising principles to effectively and efficiently reach their target audience. Hence much of the small business marketing efforts are wasted and as proof all you have to do is to open your local paper, look into your mailbox or jump online and that’s just in the consumer space, the business to business and professional categories are even worse!
But this is not another article pointing out the shortcomings of marketing by small business owners. We’ll focus on those entrepreneurs who understand the importance of marketing for the success of their business. The 8% (PWC survey “Private Business Barometer IV”) who didn’t nominate the slashing of their marketing budget as a coping strategy during the Global Financial Crisis; the 8% who know their history and understand the importance of maintaining or even increasing marketing investment in a weak economy. They know that competitors tend to cut spending during a recession thus creating opportunities and that maintaining promotional spend during tough economic times will sustain or even grow their market share.
Yes, we are talking to you, you the minority who carry the hope of all small business owners and it is for you, that we write this guide on how to get the most out of your marketing resources – your human marketing resources.
You who would never dream of appointing your personal assistant to the position of Marketing Coordinator or Manager! You would never promote an engineering professional to the position of Marketing Director or make the HR person responsible for marketing your professional services firm! Sounds crazy right? No-one in their right mind, with any understanding of the marketing profession (noun, a vocation requiring knowledge of some department of learning or science) would ever do this? Unfortunately it happens every day, so we won’t waste precious space on the CEO’s, MD’s, GM’s and business owners who allow this to occur. We’ll focus on those who understand and appreciate the importance of professional marketing in their business, where maybe our message and advice will do some good and not fall on deaf ears.
So you have come to a realisation, a point in your business when you recognise, unlike 92% of your small business counterparts, that most people couldn’t walk in off the street and run your business, so you do not expect to somehow be an expert when it comes to marketing.
So, where to from here? You have 2 choices; to outsource your marketing services or employ a marketing professional.
[download id=”1″ format=”3″]
by admin | Jan 18, 2011 | Blog
WHO DESIGNS THE BRAND?
Designing the brand is a team effort – like making movies. Many people should be credited with the creation.
The design of a brand requires serious research and understanding of your customer and prospect needs, examination of what is being offered by your competitors and how those offers are being communicated. Business owners need to answer these questions and provide them in an executable brief to their designers.
This is the job of your marketing people (in a small business it is the owner) or their marketing agency or consultant.
by admin | Jan 12, 2011 | Blog
Marketing is a recent science, especially based on its widely accepted definitions and is still less than 200 years old, whereas as branding is as old as “civilization” or at least civilization with formal trade and some form of currency!
However, just like the word branding, “marketing” is still misunderstood by most small business owners. In the same way that you can not control things you can not measure, you can not excel at things you do not understand!
Reading this blog one may get the impression that the author has little hope for the average small business owner, yet nothing can be further from the truth! SME owners and entrepreneurs in general are the most resilient and positive members of our society! And in fact they are (if still in business after 5 years from their start up) by definition great marketers…their opportunity and greatest challenge lies in becoming much better marketing communicators or simply better at branding their small businesses!
Below are the most common definitions of marketing:
U.K. Chartered Institute of Marketing:
Marketing is the management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying consumers’ requirements profitably.
American Marketing Association (AMA):
Marketing is the process of planning and executing the conception, pricing, promotion, and distribution of ideas, goods, and services to create exchanges that satisfy individual and organisational goals.
The Marketing Association of Australia and New Zealand:
Marketing consists of activities that facilitate and expedite satisfying exchange relationships in a dynamic environment through the creation, distribution, promotion, and pricing of products (goods, services, and ideas).
Just like branding is mostly about differentiation and creation of positive perceptions inside the minds and hearts of your customers, marketing is a broader concept that can be summarized in 3 words “satisfaction of needs”, which is exactly why small business are great at doing what they do! They are great at what THEY DO, being plumbers, chiropractors, architects, builders, accountants, lawyers, etc
So what can the average small business do to improve their marketing? They need to start selling benefits rather than features of their products and services.
As someone undoubtedly famous said “sell the sizzle not the sausage”, “sell the absence of mice instead of mousetraps”, “shade instead of curtains”!
In the next entry we’ll examine why Marketing is synonymous with Promotion and why Branding is the critical element of promotion.
by admin | Jan 12, 2011 | Blog, Strategy
Marketing is a recent science, especially based on its widely accepted definitions and is still less than 200 years old, whereas as branding is as old as “civilization” or at least civilization with formal trade and some form of currency!
However, just like the word branding, “marketing” is still misunderstood by most small business owners. In the same way that you can not control things you can not measure, you can not excel at things you do not understand!
Reading this blog one may get the impression that the author has little hope for the average small business owner, yet nothing can be further from the truth! SME owners and entrepreneurs in general are the most resilient and positive members of our society! And in fact they are (if still in business after 5 years from their start up) by definition great marketers…their opportunity and greatest challenge lies in becoming much better marketing communicators or simply better at branding their small businesses!
Below are the most common definitions of marketing:
U.K. Chartered Institute of Marketing:
Marketing is the management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying consumers’ requirements profitably.
American Marketing Association (AMA):
Marketing is the process of planning and executing the conception, pricing, promotion, and distribution of ideas, goods, and services to create exchanges that satisfy individual and organisational goals.
The Marketing Association of Australia and New Zealand:
Marketing consists of activities that facilitate and expedite satisfying exchange relationships in a dynamic environment through the creation, distribution, promotion, and pricing of products (goods, services, and ideas).
Just like branding is mostly about differentiation and creation of positive perceptions inside the minds and hearts of your customers, marketing is a broader concept that can be summarized in 3 words “satisfaction of needs”, which is exactly why small business are great at doing what they do! They are great at what THEY DO, being plumbers, chiropractors, architects, builders, accountants, lawyers, etc
So what can the average small business do to improve their marketing? They need to start selling benefits rather than features of their products and services.
As someone undoubtedly famous said “sell the sizzle not the sausage”, “sell the absence of mice instead of mousetraps”, “shade instead of curtains”!
In the next entry we’ll examine why Marketing is synonymous with Promotion and why Branding is the critical element of promotion.
Recent Comments