Optimizing Your Marketing Process
Third in a 4 part series on "Getting Creative with your Marketing to Drive Sales"

Over crowded markets and nonstop messages have made niche marketing more important each year. In fact it can be argued that niche marketing is necessary, not optional, today for most companies.  So what does this all imply for your marketing? You should think about which of the following you could do:

1. Have a shorter and more unique message than in the past tightly tuned to your target niche  and your USP.

2. Narrow your target customer list so you hit a smaller and better quality group of prospects seven plus times, not seven times as many people once.  This is sometimes hard and requires discipline as it is counterintuitive.

3. Vary your message delivery method to these same prospects, but also have a consistent brand look and feel to build your brand recognition and credibility along the way.

4. Look at how digital marketing can help your business.

The reality is there is insufficient information available to select the best prospects in most cases. Google has become a financial powerhouse because they not only narrow the customer to exactly the right ones by buying specific keywords, but also because they get the customer at exactly the right time - when they are looking.  This is really the first time in history this has been possible for any need. The prospect is feeding specific information into a generic system on nearly all desktops that is connected to millions of suppliers.

Today if you are selling to everyone, you are selling to no one!

You need to think about the entire sales process, not just the marketing, or attraction of customers, but also the sales process.  What are the steps you need to go through to close new business?

Attraction - The Multi-Step Marketing Campaign

If your product is expensive then odds are there is a significant sales cycle and many contacts are required anyway.  You should consider a planned three to four step marketing program that will continue to qualify and educate customers along the way. A free offer can be very effective and identify the best prospects if the free item is valuable only to people likely to be interested in your product.   Your free offer could be an ezine, like this one, a report, or something else your prospect really needs. It should be cheap to produce and distribute on a mass scale (electronic is always cheap).  Information is always a good match also as it costs little to nothing to distribute more of on a large scale.  However, your freebie must be something that is compelling only to serious prospects.  If not it could fill your marketing funnel with bad prospects who will waste your time and money simply because they want free stuff.

The advantage to a free offer is the first (cheaper) steps can be more broad (shotgun) and then at each successive step you can invest more (rifle) in a better qualified prospect set.  Basically this allows you to focus more of your marketing and selling resources on the best prospects. If the free offer is something of real value ONLY to people who can benefit from your product - like a checklist to evaluate products and services like yours, or a report on the industry comparing suppliers, then you should not have too many unqualified prospects signing up.

Steps two and three are usually phone or mail contacts, but they are done mainly when the customer has already identified themselves as a prospect, not just a suspect on some purchased list. Discipline in follow-up here is critical. Most lost sales are because the salesperson gives up before the third or forth contact when people are ready to buy. Persistence and a tracking and tickler system of some kind is key.

If the later steps involves a more expensive direct sales person then they are being fed only very qualified prospects - saving you money.  The better you can narrow your target group the more you can spend on each more qualified prospect in successive steps. This not only raises your chances of closing the prospect but it also reduces your marketing and sales costs overall. This one-two punch can increase your marketing efficiency (marketing cost per sale) by four times or more.

Creative Marketing Strategies

With the advertising overload you must use creative marketing tactics at each step that cut through the clutter of ads, offers and messages numbing our minds.  Some things to consider in the design of your marketing plan that many businesses overlook:

1. Mixing tactics by hitting the same group of people (ad, email, sponsorship, postcard, and letter)

2. Touching customers and quality prospects at a regular frequency (4 to 11 times per year is generally the right range depending on the market)

3. Reinforcing your key messages repeatedly - do not vary these core messages
             (USP, VSP and ESP) just the way you present them.

4. Using newer, and very measurable, digital marketing technology including email, ezines, web site keyword optimization, blogs,  etc.

5. Partnerships where the partner has an overlapping client base but is not competitive. These are becoming more important each year due to rising customer acquisition costs.

You are pushing a flywheel here to get it up to speed and should not view marketing as just a sales attempt that succeeds or fails. It is a process or continuum to bring your prospects along and have them understand why your solution is best for them. Remember, marketing is anything that positions the company in the eye of the potential or existing customer. Every contact you have is a marketing opportunity, so map these out and teach your employees how to take advantage of each opportunity.

The next newsletter in this series will discuss "Measurement, Experimenting and Other Creative Marketing Tactics" to consider.