The Tap Into Your Customer Base podcast is all about using your internal systems to analyse your customer case.
Introduction
Hi, I’m Tracy Heatley and welcome to my all-new rebranded podcast. Be Better with Tracy Heatley. Over the next few weeks
and months, I going to be sharing loads of business and marketing knowhow with you. Everything covered is going to be based on my years of experience, your feedback, what you need to know and what my clients are asking me about business and marketing.
Is Business And Marketing Strategy Important?
People are often asking me if business and marketing strategy, if it’s important, is it effective? And my answer every time is absolutely. Yes. The positive impacts that having the right strategy can have on your business is immense. Your marketing strategies, very, very different from your goals. My rule of thumb is set your goals first and then follow up with your strategy. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be sharing different ways to bridge the gap between your goals and your strategy.
The Importance Of Marketing Strategy
I’m going to share with you lots of my marketing magic and know how in future episodes, but strategy is where it all starts. It’s something that I’m very, very passionate about because your marketing strategy, it must link to your overall business objectives. Don’t worry if you’ve not set your goals yet either I’ll be able to help you with that too. There are two crucial elements to strategy, which I’d really like to raise with you. Firstly, having a suitable strategy will help you avoid waste in valuable resources on marketing that’s ineffective. This could include financial resources. It could include human resources or your very precious time. Secondly, your strategy could take your business to places that you’ve only dreamed of because when you develop an appropriate strategy, you’re going to be reaching the right people in the right places at the right times and attracting an abundance of customers. The right customers, the customers that you want and need. Working out exactly who your customers are, and which ones are the most profitable for your business is all part of developing your marketing strategy.
Don’t Start Marketing Without A Plan
And that’s something that we’re going to focus on in even more detail as we progress to future episodes. But right now, if you are thinking about marketing and you’re about to spend money on marketing communications like advertising, SEO or social media, for examples, please let me stop you there. If you don’t have a strategy and a plan it’s unlikely to work, especially in the long run. So let’s avoid some of the common pitfalls that other people make and let’s get your marketing strategy on track. Your marketing strategy is the foundation that underpins your business. I’m certain that if you were building a house, you wouldn’t immediately start laying bricks on top of the grass. So don’t do that with your business either. Give yourself the gift of growth based on a solid foundation. I’m going to talk you through developing a solid business and marketing strategy over the next few weeks.
Internal Information
But for now, let’s start with the internal information that you have available, right at your fingertips. When I’m working on a marketing consultancy project or I’m mentoring business owners with their marketing strategy, the place we always start is with an internal audit. Now, obviously with these podcasts, I haven’t got time to do things that the level that I would, if I was working on a one-to-one basis, where we really do a deep dive into the business. But what I can do is share with you some techniques that will really help you to develop your own strategy. Quite often, this internal audit can reveal some astonishing results. And to give you an example, I worked with a company recently that were amazed to establish that their most profitable customers were in a completely different geographical location and completely different age group to what they thought.
What Could Have Gone Wrong
So imagine if they’d focused all their marketing activities targeting the wrong customers, how costly would that have been both in terms of marketing spend, but also on potentially missed opportunities because they would’ve been targeting the wrong customers? The first point is to look at your current customer base. It will provide you with so much data that will help you for future marketing.
Who are your customers? Where are they based? What are the demographics? So, if you supply customers that are B2C, business to consumer, you need to be looking at things like how old they are, what role do they play within the family unit? Where do they live? What’s the disposable income? Who within the family makes the buying decisions? If your customers are B2B, business to business, look at things like what is the size of the business? Where are they based? What part of the business life cycle are they at? How long have your customers been trading? Who purchased from you? Was it the business owner, or is it someone in a different role within that organisation that makes those purchasing decisions?
These are just a few examples of things to look at, but you’ll get the gist. You’ll know the types of things that you need to be looking for with your own customers. Focus on, on how much certain customers spend too and compare them. Contrasting and comparing will make a massive difference to this. So really do have a little bit of a deep dive yourself into your current customers. The value that will bring is massive and all that information is right there within your own internal systems. As you gather this information and certain similarities are revealed, you can start to pinpoint who your most profitable customers are. Taking the time to do this will help you identify distinct similarities and patterns of customer buying behaviour.
Allocation Of Resources
How much time you need to allocate to this will depend on the size of your business, the number of customers and the number of sales that you have. So if you’ve got a lot of customers and high sales volume, I suggest selecting a random sample and work on that. I know it’s going to take a bit of time to do this, but it will be well worth it. And it means that you’ll be on your way to getting your strategy underway.
What To Expect From The Next Podcast Episode
In the next episode, we’ll build on this and take it to that next step further. So ideally if you can do this before next week, that will be perfect. In the meantime, you could win a free 40 minute one to one online marketing mentoring session with me. All you have to do is subscribe to this weekly podcast and leave me a review. Once you’ve done that, everybody that does, that will then be put into a draw and every four weeks I will do a draw. So every four weeks you could be winning that 40 minute session. Of course, if you need my help in the meantime, if you have any questions about your marketing strategy, or you would like to know more about my marketing mentoring services, by all means do get in touch. Check out my networking training and networking groups too.
You can contact me via my website, which is www.tracyheatley.com.
Please feel free to contact me or connect to me on LinkedIn. I am Tracy Heatley. Thank you so much for listening to my ‘Tap Into Your Customer Base’ podcast and I look forward to sharing my ideas with you to help you be even better than you are right now.
Better Business, Better You.