Published: 21 Nov 2023
How do you identify which areas of marketing your business should focus on to help your business grow? That’s the question posed by author Dr David Andrews, senior lecturer at Leeds Business School and author of our latest Business Briefing Note.
The right message to the right person at the right time
Entitled Innovation and Markets, this latest Business Briefing Note for TSA members focuses on how to communicate ‘the right message to the right person at the right time’. It is all too easy to forget the importance of this simple message. For example, Dr Andrews cites research that shows that almost 70% of people said they would prefer to watch a short video to learn about a product or service, as opposed to only 2% who would like a sales call or demo. So if your preferred method of generation leads is by sales call, this might well be a massive waste of time!
The Briefing Note outlines the challenges of measuring Return On Investment and reiterates the importance of understanding the effectiveness of every marketing campaign, suggesting means of benchmarking and setting realistic goals to help with this.
Search engine optimisation
With many SMEs lacking the resources in-house to manage their website, Dr Andrews provides some useful pointers on how to optimise your website performance, with useful links to guides and e-books that can help you.
Finding customers: the constant challenge
The challenge of finding customers faces businesses of every size, but for SMEs it may be even more difficult, given that acquisition costs can be significant and you may lack the spending power of larger organisations. This is where ‘persona canvas’ can be a great help. Drawing on working communications flow models, including AIDA (Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action) and DRIP (Differentiate, Reinforce, Inform, Persuade) these can help develop new strategies and tactics, focusing on customers’ particular stage of engagement with your brand.
Spreading the news
How do you determine the best means of making customers aware of your brand? Why does PR work so well as a common approach to building brand awareness and how do you make it work for you? Perhaps co-marketing might be answer, whereby you partner with another band, enabling you to find new audiences.
Advice on how to approach co-marketing, plus much more, can be found in the full Innovation and Markets Briefing Note, which is available now to download from our website.
You can find all the Business Briefings available so far to download here, as part of our commitment to help our members build a better business.
