Business Bullets - Marketing

I've come to the conclusion that all the best companies that I've come across do this, they all review their marketing in a structured way on an ongoing basis to ensure that they are maximising their results.

Now before you say "well that's OK if you have a marketing department" hold on a second. You can benchmark all types of businesses including those in a completely different sector to you. You can benchmark their senior team, their leader, their customer service proposition and even their marketing.

I did this recently and I'm delighted to say I've had a great result. I was recently reviewing my marketing activities and remembered that marketing is finding some simple things that work for you and doing them consistently.

With this in mind I carried out a review of my own marketing system and to be honest there were a few holes in it.

Here's some of what I did to fill the holes and get my marketing running well for me again.

First I spent some time getting absolutely clear about who my target audience was. Now identifying your niche is not to say that you won't work with other companies, you can do that if they come along. But I found that by getting really clear who the IDEAL was I could create some messages that would be understood by the IDEAL.

Action: Clarify who your ideal target is.

Next I got clear on the way I wanted to help these companies and the sorts of problems I could solve for them. It wasn't enough for me to say "I help companies" I had to get specific HOW I help companies and talk about some of the value that they will experience when we work together.
Action: Get specific on how you will help your target

After that I compiled a target prospect list of the companies who I wanted to work with, who were ideal for me and I had a feeling they had the sorts of challenges that I could support them with. This isn't a vague wish list, here you are building a clear target list.

Action: Build a prospect list to direct your actions towards

Finally I devised a simple system for identifying, approaching, engaging and following up with my IDEAL targets. Here I'm talking about some actions that you will commit to doing in a systematic way on a consistent basis.

Action: Build a system where you demonstrate value up front and invite people to engage with you

All the best companies that are generating great profits do this review. If it works for them, we can make it work for us. These 4 actions are what I have taken in the past few weeks and have seen some quantifiable results, so I'm going to keep doing it.