What has 2006 been like for you? I’m sure you’ve experienced your share of ups and downs. As we get closer to the end of the year, it’s traditional to reflect back on the previous 12 months. In between the mince pies and the mulled wine, spend 10 minutes looking back at your marketing. Ask yourself – what worked well for you and can you repeat it next year? It’s also a good time to look back at what went wrong and work out what you can learn from that. Is it something that can be prevented, or fine tuned for 2007? It’s always good to learn from history – otherwise it has a habit of repeating itself.

Happy Christmas and best wishes for 2007.

In this edition:

Where is your business coming from?
The next £100,000 Marketing Seminar is already sold out!
Book of the month – The Book of Luck
Animal marketing magic - have you got a shark’s mouth approach to marketing?

One of the most common problems that I find when I talk to companies is in discovering what aspects of their marketing is currently working. Most companies advertise in a variety of publications, have a website, perhaps a sales force, a brochure and a customer base who recommend them. New business comes in and they cheerfully progress picking up new customers along the way. The problem comes when either there is a general slow down, or the company loses an important customer. Suddenly they need to recruit new customers. But where do they turn?

Well, I would suggest that if they were to consistently market themselves all year round, they wouldn’t have experienced a slow down in the first place, but that is not the point I want to make here. The point is - which of the 10 methods that they have used in the past do they adopt in order to generate a quick rush of business?

Where do they turn? Advertise more in their local paper? Do more networking? Beef up their website? Take on more sales staff? The trouble is that the company probably don’t know. They have never kept a record of where their sales and enquiries have come from, so now, in their hour of need, how do they know where to focus their attention?

It could all be very different if they had just taken a piece of paper and made a careful note of every enquiry that came into the organisation – either from a phone call, e-mail or fax. The question to ask is ‘How did you find out about us?’

From now on, I want you to look at all sales that come into your organisation and examine where they came from. Was it a web enquiry, did it come from a direct mail letter or an advert in a trade paper? But don’t stop at the first order, did the company re-order and become a regular client? Some sources of new clients can generate a high quality of lead: the type of customer that buys again and again, year after year. This information is very important because you should base your decision on each customer’s lifetime value to you - not what they
spent in response to one advert.

For example, I have bought only one product from a press advert from the company Nightingale Conant for a product that cost about £100. But since buying that product, they have put me on a mailing list and over the last 8 years I must have spent hundreds, if not thousands of pounds with the company. The profit margin on those products must have been enough for them to have run the advert even if I was the only person who bought from them! At times, you may run a campaign that generates a small level, but a very high quality of response: you attract your perfect customer who stays loyal for a long time.

Returning to the company suffering from a down turn, if they were armed with the information on which of their advertising and marketing strategies worked best for them, they would know exactly where to turn if they wanted to quickly generate enquiries.

Another reason for knowing where your business comes from is so that you can do more of what works well - and less of what appears to not be working. I say ‘appears’ because you have to be very careful about what you cut. For example, Yellow Pages doesn’t work well for many people because these days it does not generate volume. However, it may generate enough enquiries to more than pay for itself – so if this is the case, why would you stop it? Unless you measure your volume of enquires and how long they stay and spend with you – how will you ever know?

Next available date: Friday March 9th

Despite moving to a larger venue and now moving to a larger room, the January £100,000 Marketing Seminar has sold out already. This means that your first chance to attend the £100,000 Marketing Seminar in 2006 is not until March 9th. I was expecting the event to be popular, but it sold out much faster than expected, although there is a possibility of last minute cancellations, so do ask if you want to be on the shortlist.

Here’s why the seminar is proving to be so popular:

It runs from 10am until 4pm and includes more than 100 proven marketing ideas – each of which has generated at least £1,000 for my clients including:

• 14 rules and marketing principles that every business should adopt as part of their marketing.
  
• 14 rules about advertising that will generate greater responses for your business and save you money. One delegate used one of these ideas and by lunchtime had saved more than £2,000 on an advertising campaign he was running the next week.
• 16 ideas on how to retain your existing customers for longer. How to increase the value of your sales to them and how to create a newsletter that gets read. Marketing is not just about new customers – marketing should be about retaining your existing customers.
• 14 ideas for creating successful direct mail letters which, combined have generated well over £3,000,000 in sales. One marketing letter using these ideas alone won a series of contracts worth over £60,000. The cost was just £40 for stamps.
• 15 ideas to make brochures work better. Including alternatives to brochures such as special reports which can be used as part of your marketing activities.
• 5 ideas on branding. How to create a memorable brand and why so many marketing managers from large companies get it wrong so often.
• 8 ideas on how to get your business in the news. How to create a news release and why getting your name in the paper is only half the marketing story.
• 12 ideas on low pressure selling that get results. Why the ‘gift of the gab’ is not the best way to sell, how marketing and sales need to be closely linked and a checklist of ideas to help you close more effectively.
• 10 ideas to make your website more effective. Including how to generate more traffic, what to avoid on your site and how to recycle your marketing material online to generate more enquiries.
• And finally, 10 marketing and business ideas that will help every entrepreneur and marketing person become more successful in what they do.

You could argue that there is enough material here for at least four marketing seminars, but The £100,000 Marketing Seminar contains them all. Over 100 proven and tested ideas - plus we have time for a full lunch, 2 coffee breaks and some time for networking and ideas from delegates.

The cost is just £147 plus VAT. Call the seminar enquiry line on 0116 239 5245 to find out more or e-mail marina@idealmarketingcompany.com

I had the good fortune to meet the authors of this popular book last year.  We had a fairly long discussion about the book and Heather told me that the title was very different to what they had originally had in mind, but was suggested by the publisher.  “The book is actually more about why there is no such thing as luck,” she told me, but they thought the title was a catchy one.  It certainly has proved a popular book, which begs the question:  are some people just born lucky?

The authors of the book think not – in the main, people control their own fortunes. The book shows you that there is a way to structure your luck and to bring success into your life and under your control. It explains how you can create opportunities in your life and make yourself into a ‘lucky’ person.  It discusses how to learn from what has gone wrong in the past and outlines what you need to know for the future.

Summers and Watson use extensive research and draw on their personal experiences both professionally and personally, to bring you a book crammed full of practical tips on how to turn the tide of your luck. This book will appeal to people who want to move up in life, those who have been made redundant, people who have reached a plateau in their careers, people who are ambitious for the next step - or simply those who want to make more of themselves in a business or personal context.

A shark’s mouth contains hundreds of teeth. These teeth can break off during an attack, but will quickly re-grow. It is the sheer number of teeth and their ability to re-grow when they stop performing that makes a shark such a formidable opponent. But, imagine how frightening a shark would be if it only had one good tooth and the rest of its mouth was no more than a big set of gums.

The problem with the marketing efforts of most businesses is that they are like a one toothed shark: reliant on only one effective tool such as a direct sales force or telemarketing. Instead, businesses should have a ‘shark’s mouth’ approach to marketing - lots of effective, sharp marketing ideas. Every time that one gets blunted or breaks, it is replaced straight away: this way you are constantly refining and employing your repertoire of effective marketing strategies.