All along your advertising, marketing, and sales should have been grouped together under the same direction of "getting new clients" focusing on a defined target market and pursuing prospective clients. This only works when all three avenues of creating clients lines up with how your business is defined. What is your core business and what is your strategy and goals to effectively target and reach prospects of your core business? First, what is your core business? Focus on the product or service that creates 70% of your business. Then, find the mediums of getting clients that create the most return. If you aren't getting any sort of true representation of what the medium is producing in regard to prospects or physical clients then you need to find out how you can know for sure. What is actually driving your business? You must know as much of a full answer to this question as possible in order to plan your resources (aka money) accordingly and get a great ROI.
Scenario: You advertise in radio, tv, and internet and decide that you need to cut back advertising because the budget isn't there and you determine to cut back everything the same amount. Then try and rationalize this decision. Is this because you don't know which medium is most effective in reaching your target market? Is this because you consider brand awareness in a healthy dose of all advertising methods a good method for brand awareness? But how much is converting to sales? Maybe you knew the rate of return your advertising and marketing had 10 years ago but do you know the response you are receiving from your advertising choices now? These are the kinds of questions you should be asking on a consistent basis and know the answer AUTOMATICALLY. If you do not, you may be throwing money out the door, infact, you probably are.
Narrow focus on a core strategy that gets 70% of your business. This is 2 fold: First, draw in customers for a specific product or service. Example: If you're a car dealer but 70% of your sales is trucs, you need to focus on advertising to truck buyers. Get specific with who a truck buyer typically is. Differentiate yourself in this way. Narrowly define yourself to the public, give them an opportunity to respond. Then when they do, you can provide the other products or services you sell once you already have gained their trust and credibility.
Second, focus on "getting new clients" in mediums that get more reach, more frequency, and cost less to market to your target demographic.
What is available is changing rapidly. Do your homework or hire someone with experience and whose job it is to keep up with trends and learn what gives your company the greatest benefits for its investment dollars. Ever heard of value investing? This is value marketing. Same concept, different application. The market buys when everythig is going well and gets bad results. The market sells when everything is going down, which is the worst time to sell. Don't be a product of your emotions or of what the market says. Determine value by a strict standard of measuring the company's results. If you can't measure the results effectively, then get out and find something that you know the direct result of your efforts.
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