And the essence of marketing still lingers on when you visit your local market…

• Product – you receive instant feedback as to whether your product is in demand.  The way you display your products is important and you’ll sell more if it’s appealing.
• Price – instant feedback again – are people buying or not?  If not, you can change your price instantly.  The fruit and veg sellers are fantastic at this and will alter their price throughout the day; knowing they have to move as much stock as possible whilst it’s at its freshest and can demand a higher price.
• Place – Some positions on the markets are hotly contested…it’s all about location, location, location.  Where is the highest footfall and which streets attract more of your ‘target audience’?
• Promotion – I love the bustle of a marketplace.  Sellers promoting their wares and trying to catch your attention with shouts of ’10 for £1′.  As the promotion is verbal, it can be changed many times throughout the day and the regular traders will know which ‘promotions’ or headlines work best

I usually visit the local market wherever we travel in the world and have been impressed by the presentation of products in Spain and France, but the noise and bustle of the marketplace is more exciting in the markets of England and Africa.

This really is marketing back to it’s roots and its worthwhile revisiting what you do in your business – and whether things have become unnecessarily overcomplicated.

You will no doubt have heard the phrase ‘it costs 7 times more to find a new customer as it does to keep an existing one.’  But how many of us take that to heart?

Do you keep a record of the people who buy from you?

If so, do you use that information?

If not, you have an untapped pool that you can use for marketing – and it’s much cheaper than running an advertising campaign, or trying to attract new people.  And your returns will be much higher.

Here are just a few ideas of how you could use that data -to benefit you and your customers

• Send details of special offers
• Create a loyalty club
• Offer vouchers
• Send birthday / Christmas cards
• Run competitions
• Give customers useful information
• Invite people to events that might interest them

The key to keeping in touch is sending things that are relevant, interesting and of benefit to your customers… more on that tomorrow.

1. Find the time to be active online
2. Comment in the right places
3. Educate yourself about these new marketing tools
4. Constantly ask how your product or service is valuable to your customers
5. Keep in contact with your network

If you keep trying to make things work better within your network, Julie suggests success should follow…

At the end of the advert, they no longer quote their website, but ask people to ‘search for Dyson online’.  No doubt I should have seen that one coming and it’s a very interesting change.  If customers and prospects type ‘Dyson’ into Google, they will receive all sorts of information – both good and bad – about Dyson.  And that’s much more useful to a prospect than the companies own website.

It allows them to read reviews, testimonials, complaints and get a very honest impression of the company and their products.  And, honest is a key word in that sentance – if the internet can be used as a tool for keeping companies honest and actively suggesting prospects read up on their credentials and check them out, that can only bode well for the consumer – and it keeps our industry more ethical.

Of course, the companies that already lack scruples will be pushing their own ‘independent’ reviews into the online space – but it becomes more difficult to hide the people who don’t like them – especially if they’re numerous.  (If you doubt customer power, just look at ‘you broke my guitar’ and see what happened to United Airlines when they refused to take one disgrtuntled customer seriously.)

The marketing world’s a much more interesting space now customers can talk back!

• Who Are You?
• What Do You Do?
• One Benefit of Finding Out More

If you can’t cover those three things within seven seconds, chances are your prospect has already ‘left the building’.

Your literature needs to achieve the same goals, as your brochures / business cards etc. may be passed to a prospect when you aren’t there.  What do they say about you and your business?  How can you be sure to answer the three key questions listed above?  (For some top tips on your business card design, see yesterday’s post.)

Tomorrow’s post will cover more on elevator pitches, so you can create the right first impression when you meet face-to-face, but in the meantime, have a think about whether your shop window, website, or company literature are doing the best sales job they can.

This has been true in previous recessions and seems to be the case this time too.  The shops are filled with Christmas gifts and toys that serve as reminders of Christmases past.  We were shopping this weekend and saw Morph gifts, talking Fisher Price telephones and Diabolos; all of which we remember with great fondness.

Memory books are also very popular stock items – photograph albums, books people can write in to record events, such as pregnancy, Christmases past and present and ‘This is Your Life’ style albums.

People buy on emotion.  And this is true in both business to consumer and business to business situations.  Could you link your product or service to the emotional reason people buy it?  If that can also be connected to nostalgia, you could have a very convincing sales pitch in the current climate.

This is what the model looks like:

PRODUCT, naturally, concerns your products and / or services.  Do you provide the products people are looking for and what problems do they solve?

PRICE, concerns your pricing structure and what you sell your products and services for.  This area of the marketing mix is also concerned with ‘market price’ – are you cheaper than your competitors, or more expensive?  How do you know what the market is willing to pay for your product?  Can you be sure you aren’t under (or over-) charging?

PLACE, is about distribution – having your products and services available in the right place, so customers can find them.  This also concerns delivery, logistics and timing.  Distribution strategies are considered in this section – could you increase your customer base through the use of agents, wholesalers or ecommerce?

PROMOTION, is the area of marketing most people think about when they hear the word ‘marketing’.  (It’s also the reason why so many companies say they are ‘marketing’ companies, but they never actually get involved in product development, pricing structures or distribution strategies.)  Promotion is all about telling your customer you (and your product or service) exist and selling the benefits to encourage them to buy.  This area of marketing can be really creative, but it’s only of equal importance to the other three parts of the model.

Take a look at your business – and your marketing plan.  Do you have strategies to improve each area, or are you focused on the ‘pretty’ bits and avoiding the sharp (or financial) end of marketing.

Tomorrow we’ll cover another three P’s – a development of the marketing mix which is specifically relevant to organisations who sell services.