aardvark marketing consultants

I’ve spent over 25 years working in and around marketing and have been asked a great many times what the difference is between marketing and sales.  I’ve also heard lots of different answers to the question from both marketing and sales experts.

Before I even try to answer the question, I generally respond with my own question – “why do you want to know?”  In many small and medium sized businesses sales and marketing can be seamless both within the company and to the customers.  When combined well, they should work together to take a potential customer or prospect on a journey from unaware of the product or service to a loyal customer.

If I’m pushed into an answer I generally try to keep a fairly simplistic response – marketing generates demand, whilst sales converts demand to orders.  Now I’m sure there will be lots of examples that can contradict this, but I find it’s often a useful start point.

In the businesses I have been employed by and the businesses I now work with I’ve also seen occasions where the difference between marketing and sales can cause disagreement and even conflict over actions and priorities.

I read a good anecdote earlier today that gave me an interesting example of how the different role of sales and marketing can result in a very different approach to a business situation.

Company X has built a social media presence resulting in 5,000 fans or followers.  The marketing director plans to create stories, options and benefits for this group which will naturally lead them to share them with their friends and family and grow the fans and followers to 25,000 and then to 50,000.

The sales director wants to put the group through his sales funnel, filter out the poor prospects and with an estimated 10% conversion rate he can generate 500 orders in the next 6 months.

Neither is right or wrong, just deliver a different scale of benefit to the company in a different time-frame.

Happy selling and marketing,

Chris

If you listen to BBC radio or use the BBC website, chances are you will have seen or heard some publicity for the 2DAY on 10th May.  If you haven’t, it’s a repeat of an event they ran last year where they completely change the radio 2 schedule for the day, giving listeners a taste of all the presenters and shows that they air, along with some special artist performances.

Assuming most listeners tune in for specific regular shows, I think it’s a great way to cross-sell and introduce the audience to some of the other presenters and shows they may never have tried.

Many business owners have similar challenges – customers who buy one or two products or services, but nothing else from the range on offer.  Sometimes it’s an awareness issue – they just don’t know what the business offers, other times it may be that they’ve got into a habit of buying from other suppliers.

We worked with a printer a few years ago that had exactly this challenge.  The business owner knew that some of his customers were buying other print items that he could supply from other printers, often because they didn’t know he could offer them.

To address this, we developed a simple and inexpensive mechanic – all orders he sends out now include a ‘thank you for your business’ card, which on the reverse lists the full range of products he can offer.  At the very moment when his customers probably feel best about his business (when they receive their beautifully printed materials) he gently points out all the other things he could do for them.  It’s been a great success and many of his customers now buy a wider range of items.

If you can cross-sell to existing customers it’s almost certainly a lower cost way to grow your business.  If you aren’t sure how big an opportunity this is for your business, you could try using the ‘Magic Matrix’ tool which is available free (with instructions) on the downloads page of our website.

Happy cross-selling,

Chris

Local (Worcester) readers may have spotted an advertisement in the newspapers this week by Aldi highlighting their similarity to Asda – and the key difference!  This follows several weeks of heavy advertising by Asda leading up to the opening of their new store on Monday of this week.

It’s a classic example of ‘guerilla marketing’ – turning another brand’s heavy investment to your advantage for a fraction of the cost.  There have been many famous examples over the years, quite a few featuring Pepsi and Coca-Cola.

Whenever it happens, debate rages amongst marketeers – is it clever and resourceful, or unethical and damaging to the profession?  Well, I’m not going to get drawn in to the debate, but I think there is a good, relevant and valuable parallel for small and medium sized businesses.

If you are a minor player in your market, then it’s likely that the big national or international brands have spent a significant amount over the years in ‘educating’ customers about their products and services.  Rather than invest heavily in trying to re-educate your target customers, can you build on what they have done and then add the twist that makes you different and better?

Aldi are letting Asda spend big marketing budgets on educating the grocery shoppers of Worcester that price is important, then just pointing out they do it even better.

Of course, if you would like some help, our marketing consultancy service could be just what you need – give us a a call or send us an e-mail if you would like to discuss this or any other aspect of your marketing.

Have a great weekend,

Chris

… to tell me what they think”

Really?  In my experience if you aren’t getting much feedback it’s more likely to be down to what and how you ask rather than your customers willingness to respond.  If you make it easy enough, it’s amazing how many people will take a little time to give some feedback.

Earlier this year we created a new customer survey for a client who had previously sent out their own questionnaire and got a response rate of less than 15%, which wasn’t enough to make the information robust.

With our new survey we achieved a response rate of over 40%, providing some real insight into what they are getting right, and areas where some small changes could make a big difference to customer satisfaction.  And all of this improvement despite the fact that we asked more questions too!

Of course, it doesn’t stop at response rate – with careful design, we were able to ensure that the data can be used in all the client’s marketing communications; telling a very positive story about their business, but in the words of their customers.

And we gave all the respondents a chance to request samples of some new products, which created some good new business opportunities and reasons for the sales team to make follow up calls and visits.

If you don’t think your customers will give you some feedback or you’ve tried in the past and been disappointed with the response, I recommend getting some professional help – there’s a gold mine of information out there, you just need to know how to dig it out.

Happy surveying,

Chris

13,000 people surveyed, and the results are in …

… younger adults are more likely to binge drink!  Who would have thought it?

Not for the first time I, and I suspect many other people who heard today’s ‘news’ were probably left wondering why it took such a huge and no doubt expensive study to confirm what most of us already knew.

Of greater concern is the possibility that studies such as these make people sceptical about the value of research.

At it’s best research can be and should be genuinely insightful – presenting a new perspective on customers, competitors and other markets that opens our minds to new commercial opportunities our businesses can profitably exploit.

Well-designed research with a clear purpose, followed up with action can play a vital part in ensuring enduring success for any business,and it doesn’t have to cost an arm and a leg.

We just need to make sure we don’t spend scarce business cash and time stating the obvious.

Happy learning,

Chris

Worcester city centre businesses were recently offered the opportunity to have a mystery shopper visit their premises through the Visit Worcester BID initiative.

At the evening awards ceremony there were many business owners eagerly awaiting the results and wondering if they had won in a particular category.

Although not everyone won, the feedback they received would help them go back and discuss the experience amougst the staff and hopefully improve their overall customer service. It has to be remembered that what was measured was a oneoff ‘snapshot’ picture of the business and that the service should ideally be continuous to be validated.

The Aardvarks have been offering mystery shopper programmes for the last couple of years for clients who already provided good service but who were committed to providing sustained and lasting high standards of customer care and training all their staff to be responsive to customer needs.See more here

Looking after your customers well makes excellent commercial sense – not only will they return to you time and time again but will talk about you and encourage others to do the same. Sadly the converse is also true, probably everyone has had a bad experience and talked to everyone about how disappointmented we felt.

So, should you think about mystery shopping? Here’s our checklist list of questions you should consider before you decide:

• Do you regularly use feedback from customers to inform your business decision making?

• Do your customers agree with what the management think are your business strengths?

• Is the quality of customer care in your business consistently excellent?

• Are your business key performance indicators related to customer care?

• Does your business have independent evidence of the quality of your customer care?

• If customers do not have a good experience what would be the impact on your business in the future?

• What happens to the quality of customer care in your business when you / senior management are absent?

• How many of your customers become repeat purchasers?

• Do your staff ‘upsell’ to your customers?

• Do your staff always arrive early for their shifts?

• Do all your staff who have contact with customers (by phone, e-mail, face to face) know what excellent customer care should be?

• Are your staff incentivised to get customer care right every time?

• Do you have a staff appraisal process that rewards good customer care?

• Do staff work effectively together as a team to ensure great customer service at all times?

• Do you have regular meetings with staff dealing with your customers for training and for rewarding excellence?

Mystery shoppping doesn’t have to be expensive (although some large corporates do invest £millions each year) . It should pay dividends if you implement a well designed programme as you increase the lifetime value of each new customer and get your business talked about for all the right reasons!

Cheers

Gill

In amongst all the loud noises about the opportunity that Facebook offers businesses, there are a few contrary experiences.

A number of high profile organisations have closed ‘storefronts’ on the social networking site.  The latest of these, Gamestop opened in April last year to sell to the 3.5 million or more people who had declared themselves ‘fans’ of the video game retailer.  Now they’ve closed the site.

Last year Gap (5.6 million fans) opened and closed a storefront, finding that customers preferred shopping on their own site.

In an article published yesterday, Bloomberg identifies JC Penney and Nordstrom as others to have opened and closed storefronts, and quotes Wade Gerten, CEO of social media developer 8thBridge “It was basically just another place to shop for all the stuff already available on the retailer websites, I give so-called F-commerce an ‘F.’”

Sucharita Pulpuru, and analyst at Forester research said “There was a lot of anticipation that Facebook would turn into a new destination, a store, a place where people would shop, but it was like trying to sell stuff to people while they’re hanging out with their friends at the bar.”

This suggests to me that as with any form of marketing or selling, we need to be clear in our understanding of customers – is our great new idea really adding anything that they value; does this media channel give us access to new audiences; are they really going to be receptive to our message?

Best wishes, Chris

How often in your business do you find it difficult to set priorities for your marketing? Have your ever felt that you are being bombarded with great ideas that have the potential to transform your marketing, if only you had the expertise to implement them well?

Just when you felt you had had got to grips with your traditional marketing like advertising, brochures and leaflets along comes the website. Next your website has to be found ahead of your competitors – you now need to use SEO or pay per click just to get yourself noticed.Once the website was sorted along came the social media revolution and now your website has to have links to a Facebook page, your LinkedIn profile, your blog and twitter activity. Talk to the experts right now and the latest bright new shiny objective is to have company videos on YouTube and a Google+ account.

Typically business owners and managers we talk to feel a little like a ‘rabbit in the headlights’. The huge number of choices before us means that there is a danger we can become paralysed and unable to take a sensible decision regarding investing our time and money wisely. Spread out our precious marketing budgets too thinly across too many activities and we risk being ineffective in our communication, as well as feeling exhausted by all the effort we have to put in trying to implement it all! Or perhaps the opposite problem happens, when we invest heavily into one channel of communication only to feel regret at a later date when we think we have missed out on opportunities that could have given our business a better return on investment had we opted for a different way of communicating.

Of course, the best course of action is to have a marketing plan with well thought out strategies. But ocasionally, even with sensible plans and strategies in place, we could still fail to achieve the desired results if we try to implement everything all at once.

Mike Crosson has a great way to illustrate this problem of trying to accomplish too many new strategies at once.Imagine you are on an island and you can see another island in the distance. On this second island is a pot of money. In order to access the money you need a method to build a bridge between yourself on your island and the money on the distant island – your strategy.
Let’s say, for example, you decide that LinkedIn could be the means of building this bridge between the islands so that you can access the money. You start spending a little time each day on LinkedIn, making new connections and working on your LinkedIn strategy. However a few weeks into this building activity, before it starts to work for you, someone says to you “You need to have some great videos to get your message across to customers, it’s a great way to get new business”.

They may be correct about the videos but it’s easy for you to make the mistake of dropping the LinkedIn activity before the strategy is in place and working effectively, i.e. you didn’t finish building the LinkedIn bridge between those islands first. Diverting your time and effort into having some new videos done could mean that you don’t acccess money from LinkedIN – that wasn’t finished – and you haven’t completed your video bridge either so there is no income from the video marketing.

What would happen if you then tried to start a Facebook strategy when someone else tells you this is a great way to win new business? I’m sure you get the idea.
You can watch Mike’s video via this link and then click on the third one in the sequence – How To Ensure That You Complete The Things That You Start So That You Get More Closings

So, to avoid being the rabbit in the headlights, have a plan, and have a few well thought out strategies that will connect you and your business with those exciting new opportunities or new customers. But be careful with implementating your marketing. Make sure that each communication bridge is sound and that it is accessing a good income stream before turning your attention, time and effort into the next big new shiny idea

Gill

When I was school age, one of our big heroes was Evil Knievel.  For those younger than me, in the 1970s he was probably the best known stunt man on the planet, famed as much for his crashes and near-death experiences as his successes.

His speciality was ‘ramp to ramp’ motorbike jumps, but such high risk ventures had an inevitable consequence.  At the time of his death in 2007 (not stunt-related), he was acknowledged by the Guiness  Book of World Records as the survivor of most broken bones in a lifetime – for the statistically minded he broke a total of 433!

Whilst a career in marketing, advertising or PR is unlikely to expose us to such physical threats, the opportunities to participate in stunts does still exist and so do the risks.

Today’s BBC News website has a story about how BMW’s advertising agency in Germany took the opportunity to ‘brand’ a weather front ‘Cooper’ to help promote the Mini car brand.  At a price of less than £200 with all the references there were likely to be on weather forecasts, this must have seemed like a bargain.

Unfortunately, the weather front in question has been responsible for freezing conditions that have led to dozens of deaths – not the association that BMW or any brand owner would have chosen.

What can we learn from this experience?  Firstly, like my blog about the McDonald’s twitter problem a few days ago it shows that the big brands with all their resources can still make mistakes.  Also, I think it teaches us to think through all the possible outcomes of innovative marketing activity, not just the results we hope for.

But I do hope this doesn’t end the desire of marketers and their agencies to be creative, try something different and take some calculated risks – that would be very dull indeed.

Chris

Another Twitter campaign hit the headlines last week for all the wrong reasons.  McDonald’s began a campaign to promote some good stories about the brand but when the hashtag #McDstories emerged it suddenly began attracting the wrong kind of stories.

If you want to read all the gory details there’s a summary on the Business Insider website, but what really caught my eye were the quotes from McDonald’s Social Media Director, Rick Wion.  Whilst seeking to downplay the scale of the problem, he also claimed that “With all social media campaigns, we include contingency plans should the conversation not go as planned. The ability to change midstream helped this small blip from becoming something larger.”

It made me wonder what small and medium sized businesses should do in their Social Media strategies.  Whilst the sheer numbers of potential ‘problem messages’ will be far less than for McDonald’s, the risk of reputation damage could be just as big.  How many have a contingency plan and how many have the resource to implement it if the worst should happen?

If a brand the size of McDonald’s with all their inhouse expertise, agencies and consultants can get it wrong, then so can any of us – the only options it seems to me are to have an actionable contingency plan or not take part in the first place.

Happy tweeting, posting and updating

Chris