Marketing Plans

Written by Marketing Team on February 9, 2010 Categories: Marketing, Services

Your Marketing Calendar

Marketing isn’t an EVENT – it’s a PROCESS

Many business owners consider marketing one of those annoying tasks that’s left until the last minute, executed badly, and completed begrudgingly. Worse, it’s done haphazardly, ad hoc, with little or no forward planning.

Here’s something you should repeat over and over again, until your staff beg you to stop:
“Marketing is not something we do as a side-issue, it IS WHATWE DO all the time! The treatments and products are just the stuff we feed down the marketing pipeline.”

All businesses are marketing and sales organizations - only the ‘product’ (or service) changes.”

If you have a computerized database, it will be easy to organisations… set up a series of marketing direct mail pieces that only the ‘product’ correspond with certain events. (or service) changes.”

For example, you can set up your database so that a birthday offer is sent out each week to those clients on your database whose birthdays occur in the following two weeks.

Here’s a list of ’special events’ that could be set up to trigger a letter containing a special offer:

‘Missing in Action’ -let’s say you haven’t seen a client in three months. You can set up your database so it automatically each week gives you a list of such clients and you can post them the appropriate letter in the sales letters section of this manual.
Client birthday – each week, you can send those with upcoming birthdays the
appropriate letter from the sales letter section.
‘Top Client’ Letter – in most businesses, 80% of the income comes from the top
20% of clients. You could set up your database to alert you when these clients have
spent a certain amount in a set period, say three months, and send them a special
‘thank you’ letter accompanied by a gift voucher.

Then there are the ‘Calendar Events’ that should trigger a standard series of letters to clients. So, there are two classifications of regular mailings you can set up;

Letters to clients that are triggered by client-specific events, such as birthdays
Letters to clients that are triggered by calendar-specific events, such as Christmas, Mother’s Day, School Holidays and so on.

Get yourself a Yearly Planner. They are readily available from office supply retailers. Make a list of marketable ‘events’ on the planner. Then backtrack one month. That’s when you need to start taking action to market for the event. Not two days out.

Secrets of Sales Letters – (It’s Salesmanship in Print or email electronic format )

Most businesses fret about getting ‘new’ customers in the door, constantly worrying about where the next customer is going to come from. But amazingly, many businesses hardly bother to market to their existing client base at all. I suppose they figure ‘well, we’ve got them as a client now, we don’t need to bother with them anymore’.

Yes, it IS important to keep feeding a business with ‘fresh’ clients, for all sorts of reasons. Old clients move away from the area, inevitably you will lose a client here and there because of dissatisfaction.

Newsletters

4 Great Reasons to Send Newsletters to Your Clients

Statistics say that if you send out a newsletter monthly for 24 months, 65 % of the nominated members on your database will purchase from you!

“…they always bring in more money that it costs to have them printed and mailed out…”

A regular newsletter sends a message to your clients that you care about them.
Especially if it contains a note saying ‘as one of our most valuable clients, you are
receiving this newsletter to inform you of developments in the service and goods we provide. People want to feel special, cared for. They don’t want to have stuff ‘pitched’ to
them all the time. There is no better way of keeping in touch with your clients with
information that is useful to them than a regular newsletter.
Having said that, once you have set up a regular newsletter ‘pattern’, it becomes
simply the best way to communicate special offers to your clients. When your
newsletter arrives in the mail every couple of months, they are expecting it, they
open it, and they read it.
You become the expert. There is a term in marketing called ‘positioning’. As the
author of a newsletter on beauty and skin treatments, you set yourself up as the
‘guru’ in the business. You become the one to turn to. And when a client you haven’t
seen for some time suddenly decides it’s time for some treatment, who is she going
to call? You, of course.
A newsletter can also be a great way to involve your clients in your own special
‘community’ surrounding your business. You can promote competitions, include
news of clients’ activities. A newsletter is the perfect vehicle to promote a special
‘club ‘ in which there are members at various levels. People like to see their name in print. And if, in your newsletter, you talk about ‘Platinum Member Joyce Smithers’ or ‘Silver Member Alice Jones’, you will find that other clients will want to know how they can achieve a higher level of membership, Especially when you talk about the extra benefits of being a Platinum member.