Marketing Plans & Strategy Consultants for Small Business

As the flow diagram above shows, our speeded up strategic marketing process can involve:

• Conducting a thorough Marketing Review of all aspects of your marketing, including your website, social media, digital marketing, value proposition, Products, Pricing and other communication channels.
• Carrying out competitor, customer and market research (as required).
• Running marketing planning workshops and brainstorming.
• Profiling customers to target.
• Creating the right marketing mix for acquiring new customers and retaining existing customers.
• Agreeing your brand values.
• Creating a Marketing Growth Plan with clear actions, quick wins, owners and priorities.

Check out some of my video testimonials.

Some of the many benefits of having a practical marketing strategy and growth plan are that it…:

• Ensures you take your business in a clear direction with goals and priorities.
• Ensures you invest your time & effort in the best, most effective marketing channels.
• Means you don’t waste your marketing budget & resources on unplanned marketing.
• Ensures you know and understand your ideal customers.
• Helps your business stand out from and beat key competitors with an authentic sales pitch and USP.
• Increases lead conversions, prices, profits and customer lifetime value.

Have you conducted a customer satisfaction survey within the last 2 years? Do you regularly collect feedback on your perceived strengths and weaknesses, and brand values?

Do you regularly benchmark your business against 3 to 5 key competitors?

Knowing your customers and competitors is fundamental to marketing your business successfully. Do you know the size of your reachable market and what the market trends are?

How good is your customer experience?

Providing excellent customer experience means really understanding and satisfying your customers’ needs and wants, rational and emotional. It also means providing excellent customer service.

If you retain just 5% more of your existing customers each year, your profits could increase by 20%. You could start by prioritising some quick fixes which improve customer satisfaction ratings with your most profitable customers.

“Customer service is providing an excellent product at an acceptable price and solving legitimate problems (lost packages, replacements, refunds, etc.) in the fastest manner possible. That’s it….” (Tim Ferriss)

Real Marketing can:

• Create research programmes using online questionnaires, telephone interviews, Zoom interviews, face-to-face interviews or focus groups.
• Use the research to help you refine or develop your marketing strategy and marketing plan.

Research is fundamental to all good strategic marketing.

Most businesses should have their website as the hub of their online presence.

You need to have a planned approach to your website and all your digital marketing channels: ecommerce and digital processes; social media marketing; email marketing; content marketing; conversion rate optimisation; and search engine optimisation (SEO and AI Search).

Real Marketing can be your website project manager, creating your website map and website brief, copy writing the website content, planning your calls to action and conversion rates, and managing your website designer.

As website experts and digital marketing consultants, I can help you develop a winning website that drives conversions and sales.

Feel free to book a call to review your website and digital marketing.

The quality and delivery of every aspect of your products and services has an impact on customer demand and therefore on sales. This means that you must treat your products and services as part of your marketing.

Too many businesses think that marketing is only about communications or Promotion. It shouldn’t be. Marketing should also include ‘P’ for Products.

Are your services properly packaged up, or ‘productized’, to make them much easier to market? Well packaged up and presented services are more tangible which are much easier for new customers to understand quickly, significantly improving sales and conversion rates.

Real Marketing can work with you to:

• Conduct customer research on your products.
• Research and plan the development and launch of new products or services.
• Develop product definitions and product road maps.
• Manage the product development process and work with technical teams.
• Create your product plan, develop product packaging, and implement launch campaigns.

With more than 30 years of experience, Christopher Lamotte at Real Marketing Transformation has launched innovative new software, telecoms, internet, drinks, designer and service products.

Measure Your Marketing’s ROI

All businesses should measure the effectiveness of their marketing spend with meaningful metrics, but too often we don’t. You should approach your marketing spend with a strategic ‘investment mindset’ and not an ad hoc ‘cost mindset’.

Do you measure your website or sales conversion rates, for example? Fortunately, digital marketing tends to be easier to measure than traditional activities, and over 80% of budgets are now being spent online.

However, many small businesses don’t have a defined budget or know how much they spend on marketing. So, their budget is often wasted on unplanned marketing communications that isn’t following a clear marketing strategy; culprits can be: last minute ‘advertising offers’; cowboy SEO retainers; and unmanaged, long term, Google Ads campaigns.

Have a Clear Marketing Budget

Some marketers recommend that small and medium sized businesses should spend 7% to 8% of turnover on their marketing budget.

In practice, many SMEs spend 2% or less; however, a tight marketing budget is still a ‘budget’. If this marketing investment is spent well, it can have a huge impact on business growth and revenue.

But, promoting your business on a small budget should not be ‘marketing as cheaply as possible’. Cutting costs with home-designed brochures and adverts, poorly conceived websites, incomplete search engine optimisation, over-reliance on un-engaging social media or old fashioned selling techniques, can damage your business and brand.

Tips for making your marketing budget work much harder

• Ensure everyone asks new customers where they heard of you, then record the data in your contact manager or CRM system.
• Measure conversion rates over time.
• Analyse your customers’ acquisition costs.
• Ensure Google Analytics is properly set up with goals.
• Measure the ranking of your target keywords in search engines and how they change over time (or ask your SEO specialist).
• Measure your performance against your marketing objectives.
• Monitor your management accounts, particularly your sales and profits.
• Agree a range of Marketing Metrics and review them every 3 months. Track the trends over time.

But, not all marketing is measurable, so sometimes you still have to rely on gut instincts to judge whether the expected return justifies the cost of the campaign.