Marketing activities that creates “clients”
When I was browsing my notes on my computer I come up with the following image. I can’t remember from where I got it, so apologies for not mentioning the person who draw this. It’s basically marketing activities but like the one I wrote about sales (here), it puts the marketing activities with a funnel of measurability, broadness, and interactivity with the clients.
Only thing that seems not right for me is the end part. In my opinion, all these marketing activities do not create customers but clients. Clients become customers only when they pay (not buy!, pay).
All these activities can be used at the same time or some can be selected and used depending on your marketing strategy. It also depends on many other things like how much budget you have, your resources, etc. Below you can see a very simple marketing cycle focused on online only. Offline part is more or less the same thing with different nomenclature maybe.
For small businesses; the activities that can be done for no or very small cost are mainly, PR, Direct Mailing, SEO, Website, Trade Shows, Opt-in Emails, and F2F (Face to face) meetings. Most of the time, small businesses do not do these all but struggle with daily challenges. This is because they do not set a solid strategy that they need to follow. Thus they mostly find their clients through references, and try to keep them in portfolio. They spend so much effort on keeping clients, that they do not have time to invest in finding more.
Small businesses should;
- Plan a solid Marketing Strategy
- Define communication strategy
- Pick up the less costly, most effective; targeted, marketing medium
- Put measurements and measure
- Then optimise as shown at the image above.
References are good, and important, but creating many many qualified prospects will definitely help Small Businesses spread the risk of having hard times in sales.
Sales begins with the clients generated here. Depending on how much qualified the prospects are, the sales cycle can be short or long. It eases the sales peoples lives.
Once I was managing a reseller channel. Most of the resellers I had was selling by references. One of them was very passionate about developing his business with our products. We chose a different lead generation model for them together. Besides the existing marketing model, we put outbound call center operation to the model to reach more and more potential customers. With even three Telesales people, in just one year, they reached more clients than they did for the last 15 years. Although they converted a very small percentage of the clients they reached to customers, they made more revenue than that they did for 15 years (for our business line only). It was costly, but it was effective. It worked for them, it worked for us. Our products were suitable for it. They copied our marketing strategy and changed a bit for their business size. Later on they started web, SEO, Opt-in emailing, and events. They still do. Now they’re more bigger that they started working with a PR agency.
The more clients you have, the more opportunities are there on the table. The more opportunities you have, the more sales is on the table.
Technorati Tags: marketing funnel, planning, marketing strategy, clients, customers, generating clients, lead generation, lead generation model, communication strategy, strategy, media planning, media, targeted marketing, measurement, measurable, optimisation
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