As we approach the beginning of a new decade, many people will be reflecting on the last 10 years and speculating what the 2020s will bring. In terms of marketing, I think we can be fairly confident that there will be further advances in technology, and more fragmentation of media, making it yet more complicated to reach target audiences with the “right message at the right time”.
In recent years, the growth in numbers and sophistication of CRM systems, Marketing Automation software, Social Media platforms, click funnels, re-marketing, etc. have provided a dazzling array of tools for marketers, but also increasing pressure to adopt the latest advances, with all the associated time and financial investment required to execute them properly.
My question to business owners is “do you need them yet?”.
Or are there more conventional (old fashioned) activities that can still deliver the results you need in a simpler way?
In the last quarter of 2019, we have created a programme of simple SMS promotions for one of our clients. We identified that many of their customers while happy with the service purchased were not repeat purchasing, so we send a promotional offer to customers whose last purchase was between 2 and 12 months ago. We could undoubtedly run more sophisticated offers, more tailored to their previous purchases, we could set up follow up communications based on responses and we could probably tie in at least 3 social media platforms.
Is it working? In a word, yes! We began with a small test and have then gradually increased the scale of the activity targeting a bigger pool of customers each time. We have also tried different promotional offers. Across all the promotions run so far we have seen an average return of £7 of gross profit for every £1 of spend and sales from the last promotion were worth 9% of total revenue during the promotional period.
To return to the earlier point, we could have set out to do something more leading edge, with bigger potential returns. But we were able to implement this activity quickly, test it on a small scale (the first promotion cost around £250) and if we want to go for something more complex we can do it while the current promotions are running and use the profits they are generating to pay for the IT, training and other upfront costs.
Alternatively, we might just keep going, keeping it simple. They won’t win any marketing awards or get lots of great PR, but the bank balance looks great!
If you would like some simple, practical advice to improve the marketing of your business in 2020, give us a call on 01905 885 285 , email us or send us an enquiry .
Happy Marketing,in 2020!
Chris