To fail to plan is to plan to fail.

Hackneyed maybe, but definitely true!

I gave a seminar to an audience of SME business owners. Taking a bit of a flyer, I asked for a show of hands. “Do you have a live marketing plan that you actively use?“  Not a single hand was raised!

Over the next few weeks we are planning a series of blog posts to help address this situation. By following the ideas outlined in this series, you can develop and implement a sustainable marketing process within a modest and realistic budget.

We marketers love our acronyms and we really couldn’t launch a programme such as this without our own so we have PIMMS.

PIMMS is a model developed by BSA that takes you through the process of creating and implementing a marketing plan for your business.

You may find this PIMMS proforma document useful. We will be looking at 1 stage at a time but feel free to look ahead, I’m sure you will anyway!

The steps of the process are:

• P – PLANNING
  1: Your Objectives – What do you want to achieve?
  2: Your Proposition – What is so good about your business?
  3: Your Target Market – Who do you want to sell to?
• I – IMPLEMENTATION
  1: Get your message visible
  2: Don’t wait for people to find you – go out and tell them
• M – Monitor
  Use web tools to check what sort of impact you are having
• M – Manage
  Use market feedback to improve your marketing
• S – Sustain
  Stick at it. The best results come from INTELLIGENT PERSISTENCE

We are happy to help you if you wish but the entire process can be completed using common sense, internal resources & free tools available on the Internet.

If you would like to follow this series, then why not follow us on Twitter or sign up for our newsletter, and we will make sure we tell you when new posts in the series are added.

To get the ball rolling we are looking at the first step – Your Objectives – next time!

NOTE: Most of our case studies are real-world examples of BSA clients. This is an exception where I want to show how a bit of thought can help you make daily deal marketing work for you -and how to avoid the horror stories.

See here how some minor changes can turn a horror story into a goldmine:

Many people have heard the story of the local Cupcake baker who nearly went bust when their deal on Groupon swamped them. Clearly daily deals can give a real boost to your business but how do you make sure you get the maximum benefit and don’t let the success backfire….

Here are 4 key tips – the anatomy of a great deal….

1. Don’t over commit yourself

• Get some idea of what response you might expect. Ask the deal site for stats on how many users they have and typical numbers/percentage of deals taken up in your sector.
• Think carefully about your capacity to delver on the deal.
• Put a limit on the number of deals available. If you sell out it makes for great publicity and you can normally rerun the deal later.

2. Price your deal carefully

• The deal site will give you advice on the levels of discount you should be offering.
• Be clear about your objectives. Are you looking to make meaningful profit on the deal or using it to build your customer base where your real benefit comes from repeat business?
• Make sure you know your real costs and be VERY careful about offering a deal price that doesn’t at least cover these.
• How much do your customers normally spend with you? If you set the value of your deal below this amount you can realise significant overspend on the deal – more revenue to you.

3. Get your timing right

• Let your deal redemption run for a reasonable time so that you don’t get everyone coming at once.
• Don’t let redemption run forever. A time limit puts more focus in your customer’s mind.
• If you have busier and quieter days, set the redemtion to finish when you are normally quieter in case there is a last minute rush.

4. Think about terms or restrictions you could impose

• Limit the number of vouchers that can be purchased by one person.
• Limit the deal to new customers only.
• Only allow redemptions during times when you are normally quiet.
• Require voucher customers to complete a registration card.

Hopefully these tips will give you some focus on how Daily Deals may work for you.

And finally, here are a couple more thoughts:

Remember that the Deal Site will take a significant commission from your deal price – don’t forget to include this in your costs.

If you are looking to build your customer base don’t forget to record customer details when they redeem their vouchers. We have seen a client assume they would be given a list of all voucher purchasers by the Deal Site only to find out, when it was too late, and this was not the case. Their deal was offered at pretty much cost price so they ended up with a great deal of work for nothing.

To demonstrate our approach, I have put together a (dummy) case study showing how the Cupcake company could have made things work out better. Click here to take a look

Here is a link I found to a site listing lots of UK Daily-Deal sites

Tax Returns are just one of those things you have to deal with – a bit like dentists – but unlike your dentist, there are serious penalties for missing your appointment and this year they are more draconian than ever.

Thank you to Peter Hayes from Newland Hayes Accountants for this timely reminder.

Penalties for missing your Tax Return deadline

Note: These penalties relate to filing your Tax Return, NOT paying any tax you may owe. All penalties are CUMULATIVE!

1 Day Late

A fixed penalty of £100. This applies even if you have no tax to pay!

3 Months Late

£10 per day for each day late after the first day up to a 90 day maximum – £900

12 Months Late

£300 or 5% of the tax due whichever is higher. In serious cases you may have to pay up to 100% of the tax due.

All of the above penalties are cumulative.

Here is an example:

Mrs A’s tax return is due on 31st January 2012 but HMRC don’t receive it until 5th August 2012
Mrs A’s return is over 6 months late so she will have to pay the following penalties:
£100 fixed penalty PLUS
£900 penalty – i.e. £10 per day for the 90 days from 1st May 2012 to 29th July 2012 PLUS
£300 or 5% of the tax due whichever is higher

A total of AT LEAST £1300 – and this is even if she had paid her tax on time!

You have been warned!

If you need any help with your Tax Return do get in touch with Peter who will be able to help.

Networking is a real growth area in business development. If you want to get to know more people relevant to your business (whether as customers or suppliers, or both), networking, where you meet people regularly, can be very effective – and the key to networking is not just the people you meet but the people they may be able to link to you to as well.

There’s no getting away from it, one thing that challenges most newcomers to networking is the idea of standing up and telling your fellow networkers who you are and what you do.

But actually, networking is a great place to develop these skills. You are amongst like minded people who have all had to face their ‘first time‘ too!

In a recent meeting of 4Networking there was a great talk highlighting some key do’s and don’t's:

1. Be yourself – networking is about building relationships with like-minded people.
2. Be specific – your message probably won’t ‘click’ with everyone in the room but it may just really strike a chord with some.
3. Don’t just talk about you – show how you have helped & benefited others.
4. Connect with others in the room by saying thank-you for help or support you have received.
5. Keep to time! – It can be a good idea to plan, practice and even work to notes – particularly as you start out.

Networking is not just about meeting people. It can also help you develop skills that you can take out and use everywhere!

Network groups come in all shapes and sizes and are aimed at a dazzling array of different markets. Whatever your business, it is likely that there is a group that fits your target market – all you need to do is look. Don’t assume all networking groups are the same. If your first experience doesn’t feel right, look further. I’m sure you can find the group that is right for you.

If you want to talk further about how networking can work for you, please give me a call

Content is King

Anyone who has interest in SEO, will know that Google has the habit of regularly throwing the cat among the pigeons by updating its algorithm to change the way it indexes pages.

Well they have been at it again. Earlier this month with an update nicknamed “Freshness“, and earlier in the year with a second update: “Panda” – which was itself tweaked only last week.

Both of these updates are aimed at ensuring that Google delivers search results that are considered relvant by their users.

Without going into too much technical detail, the main thrust of these updates is as follows:

The Panda Update

Panda changes the way that Google rate the popularity of a web page, and what the user experience is like. Traditionally, they have done this by assessing the number and quality of links coming into the page, and how well the page is designed. They have now enhanced this by bringing in user experience factors like:

• How frequently do people click on a site when it appears  in the search results
• How long do users spend on a site after they find it in a search
• How many people are referencing the page via social networking through Tweets, Facebook ‘likes‘ etc and of course the Google +1′s
• How often do people go straight back to the search results after clicking on the page

So there is a real focus on the quality of inbound links rather than the quantity. Another nail in the coffin of “500 links for $50″ link farms – no bad thing in our view!

I don’t plan to say much more about the SEO technicalities, but if you want to know more about Panda, (including where the name came from – though it isn’t as interesting as it might be!), you might find this video interesting.

I will talk a little more about the implications of Panda from a marketing perspective later, but first a little about “Freshness“, the second and more recent Googlke  update

The Freshness Update

Where the Panda update was all about ensuring that search results are offering the best user experience, Freshness is all about ensuring that search results are up to date. This is particularly relevant if your communications are time sensitive. If your content is about current news & events or celeb culture, then Freshness is going to have a big impact.

But whatever your market, Freshness puts the focus on new content, so keeping your site fresh and up to date is now more important than ever.

Again, if you want to know more from a direct SEO perspective, here is a video on the subject.

Marketing Implications

Enough of the technical stuff, the real question is what does this mean for your marketing, and how do our recommendations change in light of these updates?

The simple answer is they don’t really!

We have always advocated that the best approach to practical SEO is to ensure that your site is relevant, up to date and interesting for your target market.

These latest Google updates reinforce this position.

If your content is relevant and current, people will read it, share it and talk about it. This  will have a positive impact on your performance in search results.

One thing I would add to this is that making your content easy to share by including Like/Tweet/Google +1 buttons on your site is now even more important.

One final thing to bare in mind is that the Panda update seems to take into account behavior of non-search led traffic to your site. If users are activly seeking our your site, visiting it directly (not via a search) and spending time on it, this behaviour can have a positive effect on search performance.

We have always advocated targeted e-mail tied into good fresh website content as a great marketing approach. These updates strengthen this position through direct visits having a positive impact on your website search performance.

Panda & Freshness: Top Tips for your Marketing

Here are a few tips to consider when thinking about your marketing:

• Make sure your site can be easily updated with high quality, fresh content
• Ideally make sure that this content is available via an RSS feed (Following the freshness update Google now seem to be using RSS feeds more extensively in their serach results)
• Use  relevant buttons and links to make sure your content is easy to share on Twitter/Facebook/Google+ etc
• Monitor user behavior on your site. Are people browsing or just taking a quick look and going away never to return. This can be a indication of irrelevant or uninteresting content.
• Look for ways to attract relevant non-search driven users to your site. make sure you promote your site in all your marketing activities (both on and off line)

We have always said that if you have an interesting site, relvant to your target market, that people will be happy to find on Google, then Google will want it to rank high in relevant search results.

Our approach to online marketing has always followed this belief.

If you would like to talk about what we can do for you, please get in touch. We are always happy to talk about marketing, because we love it!

This week, Google have launched ‘pages’ on Google+.

A ‘page’, which looks very similar to the Google+ personal profile, will allow you to have a business presence on the network (Similar to the Facebook pages) and to engage with your customers on a company (or brand) level rather than just an individual level.

Setting up a ‘page’ for your business is pretty straight forward once you know where to go.

To get you going, here is a link to the system for creating Google+ pages.

NOTE: you will need to be logged in to your Google account

I have also found this useful overview of the new service.

The big question is:

Is it worth getting excited about?

As I have said before only time will tell but as it has Google behind it, it’s hard to ignore, at least for the time being.

Setting up a page is very straight forward, and will give you another route through which to communicate your message, so I would suggest that it is worth checking out.

We will be sure to keep you posted on developments with Google+, so follow us on Twitter, or add us to your Google+ circles & we will keep you updated.

With many people embracing e-mail as a de-facto standard for day to day business communication, MS Outlook – in it’s various guises – is where most people hold their e-mail contact data and, perhaps not surprisingly, Outlook is often where people may take their first steps into e-mail marketing. Whilst Outlook is fine as an e-mail client, it really doesn’t ‘cut the mustard‘ as a tool for businesslike e-mail marketing. For more details, check out our post on what to look for in a good e-mail marketing tool.

One of the biggest barriers to using e-newsletters to keep in touch with customers, prospects and other contacts can be building a database to use as a list. I have seen numerous cases where people have been MANUALLY retyping data from one computer list to another – simply because they don’t know how to access the data electronically. While I don’t recommend Outlook for e-mail marketing, equally I don’t think having to retype reams of data is acceptable either.

The export tool in Outlook is OK but it can be a bit unwieldy – and if you have a system where you use public folders to make information available to all team members, Outlook Export does not directly recognise these – not ideal!

There is however a simple, free Outlook plug-in which talks a straightforward ‘select and click‘ approach to Outlook data export. With CodeTwo Outlook Export installed, you simply select which data group you want to export (in our case this would be ‘shared contacts’ ), click the CodeTwo button: – on the Outlook Toolbar,  select which fields you want to export then click GO – and your selected data is dumped to a standard, comma-separated file which can be manipulated (normally in Excel or similar), opened, or imported to another programme (e.g. your e-mail marketing system) as required.

You can download the plug-in here

Installation and use is straightforward but if you have any questions, feel free to give me a call

Source: BSA Marketing

I received a call from a company who had taken the plunge to start an in-house e-mail newsletter. They had pulled together a modest list of around 50 of their best customers and drafted, then redrafted, then fine tuned the e-mail newsletter. Finally after running a couple of test sends, they pressed the button….and waited to see what would happen….

They then couldn’t understand why over half of their carefully honed e-mails hadn’t even been opened, never mind any links clicked or enquiries received!

I decided that maybe a post on the subject might prove useful……

The difference between warm and cold lists

At BSA Marketing we emphasise the importance of making the most of people you know. It’s well established that it is easier to get business from people who know you than from cold target contacts, and if you don’t have a good process for keeping in touch with your prospects and past customers, what happens to all those new clients you are trying to build……?

We find the response you might expect from e-mailing to ‘warm’ lists is roughly double that from colder lists though this is somewhat a simplification.

Typical open rates for ‘warm’ lists can be around 20-40% and there is no question that regular e-mailing coupled with strong, relevant content is an ideal combination.

In our experience, well targeted retail e-mails to existing and past customers with strong content and offers tend to produce the highest open rates.

For a ‘cold’ list, 10% can be considered a respectable open rate while some of the poorly targeted cold lists that can be bought on line can yield open rates of less that 5%.

The figures above are for ‘unique’ opens, i.e. we discount cases where one person opens the e-mail several times.

And remember: just because someone opens your e-mail, doesn’t mean they appreciate it. A poorly targeted message that the reader finds irrelevant, coupled with their ability to comment on Twitter, LinkedIn etc. can be really negative to your business.

Don’t expect too much

Getting your e-mail read is a good start but it would be wrong to suddenly expect your sales line to be ringing non-stop. E-mail marketing is about building relationships. The more people know about you and what you offer, the more likely they will be to come to you when they find a need – when the time is right for them.

A beauty of e-newsletters is that you can keep in touch with your target contacts cost effectively – so you can sustain your contact. It is important that you don’t take a look at initial results and immediately dismiss a campaign if you don’t see lots of enquiries straight away. Take a look at the graph above. This is a snapshot from a current campaign that started in August 2011. Over 2 months, the open rate has stayed pretty consistent at 20-25% while the unsubscribe rate is dropping off down towards 1% – but look at the click rate. Over 2 months, the click rate (that is the number of people engaging with the e-mail) has almost doubled from 10% to nearly 20%.

Deal with the negatives positively – and keep them in perspective.

There is often a concentration on the negatives of e-mail marketing, the bounces and unsubscribes, but it is important to keep them in perspective – and to realise that they have a positive aspect. The number of bounces tends to be more of an issue with ‘cold’ lists as there isn’t much you can do about them other than go back to the source of the list if they gave any sort of deliverability guarantee. With your own, ‘warm’ list it may simply be a question of revisiting your e-mail list and updating e-mail addresses from your master data (Accounts system, Outlook etc) or even calling your contacts and checking details directly!

Secondly, unsubscribes. It is a fact that people unsubscribe from e-mail lists! So long as it is only a handful (say less than 2-3 % – though higher is not a problem if it is the first or second time you have e-mailed people) then don’t worry about it. For every 100 emails you send, 97 or 98 people are NOT unsubscribing! If you do see a higher unsubscribe rate then you should probably review your content.

Whatever people say about Spam, EVERYONE makes on-the-fly value judgements on the e-mails they receive. If they like and value the content, they do not consider it as Spam – no matter who or where it has come from!

It’s not just about enquiries

Good business comes from good realationships and a key feature of e-newsletters is the opportunity to build rapport with your market through regular contact where you can make sure people remember you and effectively promote your business proposition and set out the real benefits you deliver to your clients.

The clear increase in click rates shown above demonstrates this process in action. By receiving regular, relevant contact, customers and prospects see what you have to offer and as you reinforce the benefits to them, their confidence in you grows. As this happens they are happy to engage with you further. This is first reflected in the growth in clicks whach can then lead on to enquiries and ultimately more business for you.

It’s a process

So much marketing is approached as a one-off project, be it a mailshot, telemarketing campaign or the placing of an advert etc. etc.

Marketing should be a consistent and sustained  function of your business that carries on. Sure, it is important that your marketing is reviewed and refined regularly but making sure that you do keep in touch with people rally can pay dividends.

Happy Marketing!

Marketing ideas and advice are always useful in business even if it is only to consider a tactic for your business and then decide not to use it! The problem can be the expense of accessing marketing advice. Whether you employ a consultant or go on courses, the costs can mount up.

What would be useful is a flexible reference tool that, while maybe not delivering all the answers to your marketing dilemmas, helps you focus your thoughts into considering specific ideas and options for marketing your business.

I came across this neat little app over the weekend. The SME Marketing app gives information and advice over a pretty comprehensive range of marketing topics for small and medium businesses. It doesn’t go into a great deal of detail on any subject but I found it did set me thinking about the usefulness of different marketing tools and ideas, and how I might apply them to my business.

The app has been created by a London marketing company Marketing Fundamentals (www.marketingfundamentals.co.uk).  The app costs £2.99 but I think this is a modest investment for a simple marketing primer that you can refer to anywhere and any time to get your marketing creativity juices flowing.

The app is available for iPhone with an Android version promised soon. You can download the app here

BTW: I’m not on commission!