One Life – Live It

Waiting to drive across a roundabout the other day a 4×4 went past with “One Life  – Live It” written across the back window.  Being the start of 2009 it struck me as one of those beautifully to the point mantras that sums it all up in as few a words as possible.

Pass it on

Next Monday VAT drops to 15% and already the media are speculating that not all retailers will be passing on the 2.5% reduction to customers.

Ways not to spend the budget

Well it’s easy not to spend any budget, but if you add to the challenge ways to gain marketing results without (or at least reducing) the budget then it gets interesting.

 

From experience I firmly believe and know that it is possible to gain marketing results whilst being exceptionally prudent with the marketing spend. In the current economic climate marketers should be scratching their heads not only to find ways to deliver results but to do so in the most frugal fashion possible.

 

To do this does mean thinking laterally and being a little tenacious in order to identify cost effective ways to market your business. For example, previously I managed to generate £150,000 of press coverage in 8 months at no cost to the business. How did I achieve this, well at the time I was marketing manager for a supermarket chain and had sole responsibility for one of its flagship stores, so by contacting suppliers directly I was able to leaver products that could be used as prizes.

 

Now rather than just run these as in-store competitions I offered the prizes to the local newspaper as reader competitions. The result meant that my store was acknowledged with each competition, our logo used and follow-up photographs of the winners were taken in my store and published in the paper.

 

This strategy benefited the store in a number of ways:

·        The store gained extra free publicity

·        The competitions gave an added dimension to the retail experience

·        The winners were always presented with their prize at the store, helping to create a talking point for customers

·        Being seen to be giving things away enhanced the store’s reputation and made it be seen as being more friendly

·        Goodwill was generated between the store, the local media and customers

 

So, other than my time, which was already salaried for, the cost of achieving this was £0.

 

This is just one example of how you can achieve off-line marketing results without immediately resorting to getting the chequebook out.

 

Of course effective on-line marketing activities offer a raft of highly cost effective ways for businesses to win new sales and need to be given full consideration.

Changing Minds

Last week there was one of the many “Britain in Recession” features on the TV news and the reporter explained how sales of the Mini were down a whopping 40%, ouch!

More Gloom & Doom…..

Don’t you just get the feeling that we are at the top of the rollercoaster and are about to plunge over the edge into the black hole of recession.

Isn’t It Ironic?

Isn’t it ironic that there are whole raft of retailers who are resorting to telling us how little we need to spend in order to attract us to shop with them!

The Power of Words.

Well no doubt Mr Ross and Mr Brand could add a lot to this post, but their actions do very succinctly show just how powerful words can be. In particular it shows just how powerful irresponsible comments can be, a sentiment no doubt Mr Ratner would endorse from his comments in the 1980’s.

The “R” Word Will Change How We Market

Well as if having a Credit Crunch, a near meltdown in the banking sector and a property market starting to go into freefall wasn’t enough now we’re going to get a recession too.

Back to blogging

It’s been a while since I last blogged, mainly because I’ve been undertaking the last of the renovation work on my cottage. This as you can imagine just eats up time with a ferocious appetite. Thankfully there should be just one more weekend of touching-up to do then I can relax and enjoy the fruits of my labour.

eBusiness Workshops Deliver Results

During this summer we’ve arranged a series of eBusiness workshops across Wales. The aim of the workshops has been to show businesses how to best take advantage of applications such as PPC, SEO, Adwords and Analytics.