Does your company have a balanced marketing strategy? Is there diversity between hunting for new opportunities and truly valuing your long standing client relationships?
Here are a few key marketing strategies that can help you to increase your profitability. These will take investment of time, expertise and/or money but the rewards are significant.
Strategies if you have time and expertise:
- Social Media
- Blogs and editorials
- Email marketing
- SEO
- Media engagements
Strategies if you have no time but some money:
- Advertising
- Gifting
- Entertaining
Strategies if you have neither:
- Can’t help you there :)
Let’s break it down. On one hand we have those activities that are time and expertise heavy. These take effort to accomplish and often a specialist employee or outsourced marketing agency must undertake these tasks in order to successfully accomplish the objective.
On the other hand, we have monetary investment with less need for time investment. This can be very rewarding because it is exponentially effective.
Advertising is a great example, several marketing goals can be accomplished with advertising ranging from new sales leads to brand recognition. You’re only limited by what you want to spend and the quality of the ads themselves. Both have a huge impact on the reward you reap from your financial investment. Please note that advertising has less impact on existing clients.
Gifting is a very effective strategy that, when done in partnership with a gift concierge, can take no time, only monetary investment. Gifting is excellent for impressing new clients, gaining referrals and retaining valuable clients. Client retention has a significant impact on profitability. Attaining new clients is significantly costly due to the need for involvement of both marketing and sales resources. So you surely want to treat them like royalty. If you have a strategy, say gifting, that moves you towards all goals, why not take that route?!
Nurturing existing clients can be an onerous task, but it doesn’t need to be. Entertaining clients and even gifting an experience to clients can be very effective. Entertaining clients allows a deeper connection between the sales executive and the long standing or newly acquired client. Now, we must address that entertaining takes an equal amount of time and money. So this may be hard to commit to.
Let’s address the last category. If you have no resources, that is, no time or money then you are in a bit of a pickle. Sometimes we feel that way, but if we really think hard we can work something out.
Wrapping up, how to invest in your marketing strategy: if you had to pick one…what do you have more of…time or money? Go with it. Just get started.
A parting note on the importance of valuing you existing clients:
Forbes Magazine cites business scholar John Gattorna, and his statistic that “68% of customers leave a business because they perceive indifference from the company.”