Marketing is essential to the success of any business. No matter how large or small, a clear understanding of the market sectors in which you operate and your customers, both existing and potential, is the key to future growth.
Is your marketing working? Are the £’s being spent effectively? How about a review or a new marketing and/or promotional plan from an experienced marketing consultant with a high level of experience and expertise.
As you are probably aware, marketing is not just about advertising and promotion. It encompasses everything from the development of your product or service, through pricing, the best route to market and, finally, promotional activity. Although the latter is extremely important, all of the other elements need to be in place.
By focusing on your target audience and finding the most effective way to reach them, often significant sums of marketing money can be saved. Advertising, often the easiest but equally often the most expensive way of generating business, should almost be considered as the last resort in many market sectors. Often there are much more cost effective ways of generating more sales.
Whilst your promotional activity should build awareness and raise your profile, it should also be generating bookings and visitors. Indeed, the latter should be one of the true tests of how effective your marketing spend is. Are you measuring those success rates?
An audit of your activities will provide an outside assessment of how effective your existing marketing programme and promotional activities are, together with a list of suggestions and recommendations for future improvements and actions. Often, this can be the pre-curser to the development of an official marketing and/or promotional plan. The marketing audit will consider the following elements:
A marketing audit is an in-depth review of your marketing and promotional activity. It will usually involve spending some time with yourself and your team, including monitoring and researching visitors. For a typical single site venue, the cost of a marketing audit is £595 plus VAT (discounts then apply for clients that wish to then progress to the preparation of a marketing or promotional plan).
For leisure and play businesses simply needing to identify the most appropriate methods of market communication and promotion, the package includes:
Essentially, this will help you to consider where you are positioned in your market, identifying customer types and market sectors and then illustrate the different methods that can be used to generate enquiries and orders. An excellent way to give your sales and marketing activities drive and direction.
In addition to promotional activity, a full marketing plan will start with a SWOT analysis and Marketing audit and then full consideration of not only the promotional activities, as above, but also your product / service offering, pricing policy and how you actually take your business to market. The package includes:
The full marketing plan will be a working document outlining your business objectives and strategies. The report will include suggested activities and action plans that will plot the way ahead.
To book one of the above or for further information please contact us. Marketing matters to the success of your business and we can help make it happen for you.
Our resident marketing man, Martyn Billing, can assist. Martyn is a dynamic marketeer who, having enjoyed a high level of success in senior marketing positions with a number of blue chip, market-leading companies, now offers an outsourced marketing management resource to our clients.
Having realised his abilities in providing strategic marketing advice and seeing an opportunity to provide principally small to medium size companies with this expertise on an ‘as required’ basis, Martyn became self-employed in the summer of 1998. Since then he has worked for a wide cross section of clients, including many in the leisure and catering trade, providing a unique blend of creative strategic marketing thinking and effective, practical implementation.
Marketing and promotion should be an integral part of your business plans. Proactive planning will ensure that your sales effort is maximised. Contact us now for further information and/or an informal no-obligation discussion with Martyn.