Driving sales forward during Covid-19
Fresh ideas and a step-change is the solution to building back enquiries and sales
After many interesting conversations across several market sectors served by the Owen Group, the question being asked to all of us in marketing is ’with trade shows off the radar, what are you doing about supporting prospecting, gaining new enquiries and building sales.’
The consensus for solutions looks like this:
1. Research your database and find out what communications influences them.
2. Audit all existing comms channels and measure effectiveness and ROI.
3. Prioritise on channels that work best and maximise these.
4. Research all the customers touch points and look at marketing channels that deliver to these points.
5. Restructure the marketing strategy and engage new marketing channels.
6. Regularly audit the marketing outcome and adjust accordingly.
Road map
The research phase of your current marketing activities is quick and easy to do, perhaps a tailored questionnaire out to your various databases, then produce a league table of results. The next stage is a marketing effectiveness audit right across all your communications channels, that is your webmails, PR, website analytics and more. In the retail sector there is a well used maxim ‘Max the Max’. Put the marketing and sales effort behind the most successful product line. This is your sales Trojan horse, it opens up the channel, creates activity and puts a boost behind sales and confidence too. The same principle applies to your own sales programme.
Looking at item 4, we need to investigate Touch Points, Customer Journey Mapping plus Customer Experience Design (CX). These are tools that are regularly used in most other marketing arenas for Owen customers but are little used in the marine and superyacht market. It is now time to embrace this thinking process for your marketing strategy as part of the way forward.
Now is the perfect time for embracing new marketing channels and revisiting some old ones. Back in the dark ages there was the Rolodex, a well thumbed rotary reference file on every desk in the world and the main sales channel was the telephone. So it is not surprising that ‘telemarketing’ is starting to be considered with the modern advantage of enhancing the conversation with texting and Whatsapp. Think about how you can use telemarketing in this era of home working where more time is available for telephone conversations! either with your own team or engage a service provider. At this point it is important for you, while being GDPR compliant, to revisit your databases, many companies we talk to have legacy databases in all sorts of forms of software and gathered from many sources. Databases that have all the relevant fields are gold dust. No better time to get this fixed!
So what marketing channels should we be looking at to build the message to the prospective client base? Direct Marketing comes to mind (see DM blog). Hit targets with rich content that has a long ‘shelf life’, perhaps use QR codes to connect into your digital world. There are many other tried-and-tested marketing tools just waiting for you. Big on the list is Paid Social Marketing and Retargeting Marketing (also referred to as ‘Remarketing).
Paid-for social is a powerful marketing tool. Firstly let’s consider Linkedin, the most popular SM platform, where it is claimed that 4 out of 5 members drive business decisions and considered the number one for lead generation. There is Facebook marketing to consider (Facebook Marketplace and Facebook targeted ads). Twitter and Instagram have their place in this marketing world and there are offerings of free tracking software from companies like Hubspot.
Retargeting Marketing (Remarketing) literally follows you around. Surprisingly (data from Kimberly Clark) shows that 77% people don’t mind remarketing ads because they are relevant. There are basic rules for using this system named RFM…but that is another story! To get this marketing channel working for you there is the need to drive traffic (or extra traffic) to your website. With this remarketing tool in place the investment of paying for pay-per-click is a small cost to drive more traffic to your website when you consider the value of engaging with the remarketing programme. What is the possible outcome of using remarketing? The scenario looks like this. Of the people that go to your website something like 2% look no further or take the visit to another stage. With a remarketing campaign this can increase to 60%. Like the sound of that? Remarketing can also be used with email marketing and Youtube. While on the subject of Youtube, this media channel is probably used more as a browser than a normal search. So add a corporate video strategy into your comms mix!
So what is the next step?… an email to engage in some lateral thinking or a telephone conversation about this marketing road map costs nothing but a little time… and Owens may well help you cut through the fog of Covid-19 and get the sales graph looking more exciting.
Roy Roberts, 18 October 2020
