Sorry, the last time we spoke was 3 years ago?

I was speaking to one of my contacts in the corporate world recently and we were discussing how in the past few weeks he had received many calls from recruitment firms wanting to ‘catch up and have a coffee’. The irony was that many of them he hadn’t heard from in over 3 years. The conversation went something like “Sorry, who are you again?”

If your marketing and sales strategy is to only call your clients when you want something out of them, then I strongly recommend that you reconsider this. The number of times you make contact with your clients/contacts needs to be varied and regular enough that people remember you but don’t feel like you are harassing them.

Here are some suggestions for you to keep in touch -

• Postcard/Flyer in the mail 3-4 times per year
• Christmas/Easter/Happy New Year card
• Quarterly E news or Industry update
• Copy of a magazine that has an interesting article about the clients industry

Have a safe and relaxing Easter and until next time!

The Marketing Puzzle

I was at a networking function a couple of weeks ago meeting small business owners and I was really encouraged to hear how many people were interested in learning more about PR and how it can be used to generate new business and sales enquiries. If you fall into this category, keep reading!

PR – How to get more of it for your small business
Date: Tuesday, 26th May at 6.30pm
Venue: Northcote Town Hall.
Format: We will showcase a new Marketing Puzzle format with a live interview rather than 3 presentations as in the past. The topic is “PR – How to get more of it for your small business”. A guest panel of 3 speakers will be interviewed to share with the audience three different ways to get free PR for your business. Click here to register now! 50% of tickets are already sold!

VECCI Sales and Marketing Conference

I am pleased to announce that I am one of the speakers at this year’s VECCI Sales and Marketing conference to be held on Thursday 25 June 2009 at ZINC, Federation Square, Melbourne. There is an outstanding line up of speakers and would encourage you to attend, click here for further details.

Tracking advertising responses

Investing in advertising to generate new sales/business may be one of the strategies you are considering as part of your 2009 Marketing Plan. If you do decide to go ahead with a new program, my strong recommendation is that you have systems in place to track the number of leads that it is generating for you.

Here are some tips on how to do that:

1. Ensure that every lead that comes into your business is asked ‘how did you find out about us’. Record this information in your database (or in a excel spreadsheet) and review each month
2. Create a new page in your website (therefore a unique website URL) that can be displayed in each advertisement. We do this for each Marketing Puzzle event for example. Review your website statistics each month to see how many hits you have had on each page and check that against actual sales enquiries.
3. Hire or buy unique 1300 numbers for each campaign/advertisement. This will allow you track how many calls are received for each advertising mechanism.

If you need any help with this, drop me a line.

Suite 8/115 Stanley Street,
West Melbourne VIC 3003
t 03 8060 8544
e info@nextmarketing.com.au
w nextmarketing.com.au