Recommendations and Referrals

The best marketing you can ask for is when somebody recommends or refers you to somebody else. Why is this the best? Well for a start it’s usually free but more importantly you’re getting a qualified lead that already trusts you because their contact has endorsed what you do.

We spend a lot of time getting our marketing message right, anxious to make sure that people believe what we’re telling them because we know how good our products and services are. But you know that advertising is never as powerful as somebody recommending a business to do business with.

Five reasons why referrals are good:

1. They’re usually free
2. Referred customers often spend more than those who come to you by other means (you’ve got the “trust” established from the off, so no time wasted)
3. You can ask for them confidently and easily if you know you’ve done a good job/sold an excellent product
4. Referrals give your business credibility
5. You can turn them into testimonials (always ask first) which you can add to your website, other marketing literature and newsletters.

How do you make sure you get people to recommend you?

Some businesses literally grow on referral marketing alone. Think of solicitors and accountants, alternative therapists and hairdressers. Without recommendations they would have to market much harder because these are all areas that are sensitive to the individual and require some element of trust for us to spend our money. These are our top tips on how to get referrals:

• Ask for them! You’d be surprised how many satisfied customers really don’t mind recommending you to somebody else. We’re all looking for excellent service and a positive buying experience so just a bit of encouragement to pass it on is all that’s needed.
• Offer an incentive. For example a 20% discount on their next purchase or cash back (have you noticed the banks doing this if you recommend a friend?)
• Follow up your clients after a purchase for feedback and then ask if you can use either a testimonial or if they will refer you to somebody else (whichever you feel is more appropriate)
• Use your marketing literature. When you pass out a business card, give them several so they can pass them on, or if you send out an email newsletter make sure you’ve got a “forward to a friend” button.

Think now about how many of your customers would recommend you – we bet there are a few. Time to put a plan into action!

Karen McNulty
MarketingPlanWiz

Has the SWOT moved on?

A very traditional part of a marketing plan and usually a business plan too, the SWOT analysis give us an excellent view of our business strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. I don't think for one minute we could replace it for strategic planning, but I have come across other models which help to define (in some ways much better) the direction we should follow for business.

I saw a presentation which really struck a chord, a few months ago delivered by Mike Kingston. He talked about defining the "right" customers for your business plan first, then checking that you are not breaking the main "law of business" which was essentially that you either specialise in a particular product or service or else you specialise by targeting a range of products or services to a very specific target market.

So you're either market driven or product/service driven. He pointed out that if you don't specialise in one of these, you end up in the middle of a line with "market specialist" at one end and "product/service" specialist at the other. And being in the middle means of course that you're probably trying to be all things to all people, which if nothing else is usually very hard work!

Now I now that sounds like a very long winded way of explaining something but my point is that now, when I work with my customers and we're strategic planning we look at these things first:

1. Who are their best customers? And we define them by writing a profile of a typical customer then.
   
2. What is it that those customers consistently come back to them for? (Often this is a particular service or specialism which is very easily missed until you go back and look).
3. Looking at what we discovered, what do they really specialise in? (product or service, or market).

Then we're ready to launch into our full stratgeic marketing plan. I have found this amazingly useful and in many ways more effective than starting with SWOT as it forces you to focus on the positive.

Karen McNulty
www.MarketingPlanWiz.co.uk

MarketingPlanWiz Available Now at the CIM

We're absolutely delighted that the CIM (Chartered Institute of Marketing) is now offering MarketingPlanWiz in their Marketing Shop. You can see us here.

I took us a while to get it placed with them but now we think that their visitors have an excellent choice and a clear offer for small businesses who need an easy-to-use plan for day to day reference. We were talking about targeted marketing in our Marketing Tips this month and this is another case in point.

There's often enough room in your marketplace for more than one of you if you have a clear customer profile. In the case of MarketingPlanWiz it was developed with small businesses in mind and that is still the case. If we tried to sell this as a corporate marketing management product it wouldn't be right.

On the subject of niche marketing, it's interesting to read other views on customer behaviour during a recession. This article from the marketing magazine website on marketing myths in a recession explains how trying to predict what our customers will do is not always what you might expect...

Karen McNulty
www.MarketingPlanWiz.co.uk

Are you tweeting for business yet?

It's very simple to do and at first seems a bit pointless! But the Twitter phenomenon has finally caught up with businesses. As social networks go, this one really is easy and as you've only got 140 characters to play with every time you post "what are you doing now?" - even we can manage it.

Interesting article in the Telegraph recently highlighting how we're using it as a cost effective communication tool and the amazing growth of Twitter in the UK.

Even if you don't use it to broadcast what you're up to, try following other people for a while to get a feel for what they're doing. A great way to see what the competition is up to or follow your favourite people. Stephen Fry is very popular...

Karen McNulty
MarketingPlanWiz

Technology for Marketing Show

Last week I managed to attend the Technology for Marketing show at Earl's Court in London. There were some challenging moments queuing for some of the seminars which were over-subscribed but the keynote speakers were excellent. Tim Faircliff from Reuters struck a chord when he described how one of their managers out in the field recently used Twitter to send the latest news report instead of their own newswire service! It just shows how the way we send and receive news is really changing. From a PR viewpoint it's great that we can do everything at speed but also frightening the number of media now available to use/follow and recommend to customers.

The other things that I took away with me were to watch out for more mobile applications, particularly using gps, like Google's Latitude and keep on eye on the new music social network spotify.

There's certainly no danger of anything standing still in marketing.

Karen McNulty
www.marketingplanwiz.co.uk

Discount for the New Year!

We couldn't start 2009 without our own January sale so we're offering a 10% discount on our marketing plans at MarketingPlanWiz, until the end of February. To use it, when you register or sign in, opt to buy your plan and enter the code in the discount box presented when you enter your payment details.

Here's the Code: MPLAN09

We think that's extreme value for money but as we're (sadly) passionate about planning, what else could we do?!

Happy Marketing Planning!

Karen McNulty
www.marketingplanwiz.co.uk

Direct Mail

I've been out at a business networking event today, and along with a colleague of mine, gave a presentation on cost effective marketing, using your database. Because at the moment results are important and we want to get the best return from any marketing we do.

The interesting thing about database marketing is that if you have a list of contacts (past customers, current customers, prospects) you've got a few choices on what you can do with it. Direct Mail, Email marketing or telesales are the 3 most likely ways that you can use your contact list to good effect. Direct Mail for a long time has been frowned upon because of the whole "junk mail" image. But now here do you see most "junk mail"? Yes, in your Email Inbox.

So while good Email marketing works very well (and it really does), a good direct mail shot will also now get you better results than ever because there's less out there so it's easier to stand out!

Karen McNulty
www.marketingplanwiz.co.uk