Running a face-to-face event or seminar can be a great way to interact with your target market and, of course, generate new business. But it’s getting harder and harder to encourage people to leave their workplaces and attend an event. So the way in which the event is managed and delivered will be the difference between its success and an empty seminar room.   Here’s 3 practical tips to help make sure your next event is a success. Read more

This is the first of several blog articles I intend to write about ‘compelling events’.   In case you’re not familiar with the term, a compelling event in this context is a situation that will arise in a customer’s life that will compel them to make one or several purchases.  A good example in B2B marketing would be an office move.  The impending office move date is the compelling event, and before this time the customer is likely to have made several purchases that relate to that compelling event, such as office removal services, new signage, new stationery, new office cleaners etc etc.

What is important about a compelling event is that it has a deadline.  The customer has to make their purchase decision by the time the compelling event comes around.  This then helps marketers create communications that are not only very relevant, but also perfectly timed. Read more

Measuring marketing activity isn’t always the most fun job and is certainly less fun that the creative part at the beginning of a marketing campaign.  But, unless you measure these activities, you could be inadvertently throwing marketing money away or equally damaging, not spending more marketing budget on the activities that are effective.

A simple marketing measurement – the ‘ROMI ratio’

The ROMI ratio stands for ‘Return on marketing investment ratio.  In other words, this is a simple ratio of marketing money spent against revenue generated.  For example, an IT company might run a campaign and achieve a ROMI ratio of 20:1 – this means the campaign generated £20 of revenue from every £1 of marketing budget invested. Read more

The majority of smaller and medium sized businesses do not have a marketing plan in place.  That’s certainly not a criticism, but from my experience, is a fact.  There are many reasons for this, but in a lot of cases, the reason boils down to this:  for large businesses, a marketing plan is a necessary communication tool that isn’t required in smaller businesses.

For instance, the marketing department of a large company will use their plan to communicate to management teams what will be delivered, to justify budget requests, and to lay down measures by which the marketing team will be held accountable.  But for most smaller or medium sized businesses, this isn’t needed – the business is small enough for everyone to know what each other is doing, and budgets may not be allocated in lump sums, but instead agreed on a per-project basis.  So for a smaller business, it’s very possible that a plan wouldn’t even be read, even if it was written. Read more

This is a harder question than may first appear.  Try it.  Ask yourself, ‘what is my marketing strategy?’  Does the answer trip off your tongue?  For many businesses the answer isn’t automatically obvious, and yet with three simple questions it can be.

Firstly, what do we mean by ‘marketing strategy’?

When we refer to ‘marketing strategy’ we’re not talking about specific marketing activities, such as a new website a brochure or a PR campaign – these would be defined after your marketing strategy.  We’re talking about the overall direction of your marketing – where it should be going, and what the overall priorities and focuses should be. Read more