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Contributed by The Bridge Marketing
5/06/2017 - The Bridge Marketing
Hana Dickinson, Owner of The Bridge, a marketing consultancy in Woodbridge, shares her top tip to improve your marketing and make every penny count.
It sounds simple but I swear this is the best advice I was ever given. A phrase that will forever echo in my head: “Clear up, Calm down and Concentrate”. The fact is that many businesses tend to spread their efforts too thinly, get excited and try everything at once which means they don’t get the most out of anything. Instead try different ideas one at a time, give each the appropriate amount of attention, time and effort, so it has the best chance of succeeding. Monitor what works best, stop doing anything that isn’t yielding beneficial results and dedicate your time and budget to the things that are proven to work.
It sounds simple yet it’s hard not to get swept up in the latest idea and end up adding more and more marketing tasks that mean you end up doing too much at once. It’s a trap that most businesses fall into and until this stops, you will struggle to have a really focused and cost-effective marketing strategy.
It’s OK to reduce the amount of marketing activity that you do so you can do less, better. This might sound counter-intuitive but there’s no point in being a busy fool if it’s not yielding the desired results. After all, it’s quality not quantity that counts.
Try to match effort with activity focused on achieving your business objectives without getting sucked into spending time and money on keeping up with competitors or trying the latest trend. By all means schedule in some trials – and keep reading and learning – but look for an appropriate time to test things out. Look at your plan and spot a time where there’s the a lull in activity then leap on the opportunity to try out a couple of new things. You may need to decide what marketing activity you’re going to postpone to free up the time, budget and resource to take it on.
Now back to those all important objectives: for every new idea you need to be able to clearly track it back to an objective. Which objective does it help to achieve? Is it the best way to reach that target market? Are you duplicating effort? What results to do you hope for, specifically? How soon will you see those results? Is it worth the effort / spend? Once that’s all clear you can move forward with confidence.
For example, there really is no point in spending a lot of time and effort trying to get an article in the Telegraph if your objective is to get more local business. Yes, it’s nice to see your name in a respected broadsheet but, the truth is, this type of activity is more closely aligned with increasing national visibility of your brand and bolstering credibility, not driving local sales. Perhaps securing a speaking slot at a local business conference, running an integrated digital campaign or pitching the same story to a local publication would be a better use of that time and resource.
And finally, empower your team to help you stay on track. Everyone in the team should be able to tell you your business & marketing objectives. The more they know the more they can help to focus effort on the right activities.
Make these small changes and I promise you will quickly improve your marketing and yield better results.
If you need a little help to get started, contact The Bridge to discuss your marketing, the first meeting is always free.
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