Attract your ideal customer with effective marketing

Over the last decade, I have been delivering support to other business owners as a either a franchisor, via my own businesses or from within a membership organisation.

By far the biggest request for support is with marketing and how to find new clients. So this article shares some of my key thoughts and the areas that I have consistently spoken about at conferences in the past.

To enable you to promote your business most effectively to prospective clients, you have to consider three key areas:

• What are you offering – having a clear proposition for your clients
• Strategic marketing – understand who you want as clients and how you will capture their interest to engage with them
• Tactical marketing – how you will take your message to the market and attract clients

You can read the full article on my LinkedIn Pulse listing at https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/attract-your-ideal-customer-effective-marketing-mike-foster 

The top three marketing activities for Bookkeepers

This is my answer to the question I get asked all the time when speaking to groups of bookkeepers or working with clients on a one to one basis.

Q.What are the top three marketing activities for Bookkeepers?

A. My research from working with Bookkeepers for many years with ICB, as a franchisor and from my own personal experience of running my own practice shows the top three activities are:

1. Networking - not just attending breakfast meetings, but understanding who is truly your network of key business influencers and what are you then doing to create and maintain a strong trusted relationship, so that people get to know, like and trust you.

2. Referrals - Having a proactive strategy focused on generating referrals of your ideal customers. Much more than just networking, but also taking consideration of what will encourage people to refer new business to you. How are you building credibility and also making it easy to refer you. Knowing the 'what's in it for me' factor for a referrer will make a huge difference to your referral success. 

3. Maximising your online presence led by a web site focused on your ideal customer. Yes social media and online marketing are making an impact, but still without question is the power of a good web site. A web site that tells your ideal client, from their perspective, what you offer to save them time, money and pain. After all your social media activity and other online presence such as a blog or email marketing may drive people to your web site to read more, sign up to a newsletter, download a paper or just then pick up the phone to make contact with you.

Personal development - an investment or cost?

This is always a good question for any training and development and I guess my response would be then it depends on what it is!

But some development will simply be seen as a cost because you have to do it and may not even see it as personal development. So for example, if you are responsible for health and safety, you may feel a course is not developing you but is more for ticking a box. But if we remain open minded, then I do not believe there is even training like this that we do not learn something from.

There are other areas that are very much a longer term investment. So for example, attending a regular meeting that gives you the skills and tools to develop your business may be seen either way, but I would suggest is more of an investment in a more successful future than a cost to bear.

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Choosing a trusted adviser

This is always a good question and frequently asked by our clients.

Of course, check the person has the experience or qualifications (if needed) to support you in the role you desire. For example, an accountant will need a level of qualification to submit your accounts and calculate your tax, but what are their skills and experience in providing business advice in general (if that is what you want)?

The main consideration is whether you feel you can work with the person. so go and meet with them, get to know them and take the opportunity to explore their experience and see if what they say is what you like the sound of. Have a couple of meetings with different people and have a basis of choice.

In the end of the day, people buy people and you have to be comfortable with the person you are working with and the advice they are providing. The content can be checked in many ways with the internet, other advisers or professional bodies.

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Profit and Cashflow forecasting

You cannot undervalue the process of completing a profit and cashflow forecast.
We recommend that this is a ‘live’ document in your business and not something completed when the bank manager requests.
This planning will help any business owner truly understand the numbers in their business such as which areas are profitable or not and which areas are generating cash rather than demanding.
As cash is king in business, then it is very useful to know how your trading will convert to cash utilising credit terms etc and knowing early if external financial support is required.
We recommend that you utilise the skills of your accountant to complete a full forecast of your business that is built with your goals and objectives in mind.
Then in preparation of the big picture we recommend that you really drill down on key areas such as staff productivity and return, cost of sales, fixed and variable costs, the bottom line!

Test and Measure your marketing activities

In our experience, anything that you measure usually improves. Therefore we recommend that you test and measure your marketing activities to better understand what works, what needs a tweak and what does not work, so should not be repeated.
Many of our prospect meetings for A1 Marketing identifies that many business owners simply do not know which part of their marketing is working and what is not. It is common for all marketing activities to be viewed as one and no measure of how a new customer specifically finds you.
We recommend to measure your marketing activity to the level that you can tell for each new customer or sale, which part of your marketing worked.
Once you know this, you can then start to test different variations of that activity and then gradually improve this even further until your marketing becomes even more powerful and profitable. So for example, your last batch of new customers came from your Google Adword campaign, but by testing different alternative messages do you gain even more enquiries?
We suggest that you try and use codes or references, utilise online analytics and try specific landing pages for any online activity to get much closer to measuring your activity.
As a must, you need to ask each new customer how they found you and why they brought from you, but please ensure your questions drill down to find the true reason which may be the first reason they were interested in you and not the 5th time they saw your last marketing message or what actually made them make the contact to purchase?

Common pitfalls to avoid

Research has indicated that there are some common reasons for businesses failing. It is important that you are aware of the common reasons for business failure, which primarily impacts on your cash position, so you can plan to avoid these.

• Not enough capital
• Growing too fast
• Hiring the wrong people
• Lack of experience
• Too few customers
• Setting prices too low
• Poor financial controls
• Bad debts
• Poor control of your overheads
• Competition
• Poor communication with staff 
• Health issues of the key people
• Bad management & Poor supervision
• Poor communication with suppliers
• Poor communication with customers
• Bad luck
• Poor planning

We cover these areas in more detail on our dvd. www.startyourownbusinessdvd.co.uk

Market research

The most common reply to the question of market research is that my friends and family think it is a good idea. Of course they will, as they want to support you and take a true friend to tell you 'don't do it'.

Effective market research is commonly broken down to Primary and secondary research. So your own specific research could include

• Questionnaires
• Interviews
• Focus groups
• Product tests
• Test marketing

• Published information and statistics
• Observation
• Mystery shopping

You should also undertake your own competition analysis to see how your competitors approach the market with their product or service. You may have a different approach, but your competitors have started their business, so we suggest you will not have to re-invent the wheel after reviewing your observations.

The value to your organisation of different behaviourial styles

We enjoy working with Thomas International as an accredited provider of the personality and behavioural analysis reports, using D.I.S.C. profiling.
So what value to your organisation does someone who has a High D, I, S or C profile provide?
Please read more from our recent blog to discover the value to an organisation of someone who has a high dominant factor of:

D - Drive
I - Influence
S - Steadiness
C - Compliance

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What does your design and print say about you and your business

Your stationery, business cards, website, e-mails, brochures and advertising convey your brand personality to your target audience.

The design is important in developing your image, how you are represented and what makes you stand out from the crowd.

Please make sure that you work with designers and printers that understand your vision for the business and that can create the appropriate and effective message for your business.
This is an area that can not be underestimated, even for the smallest of businesses.
You are going to spend some money to have this created, so get it right first time with the image that is right for you and your market.

Mentoring in leisure and hospitality

So what have I been doing recently?

One exciting piece of work that I have been doing is with a long term client. They are a husband and wife team running their own restaurant in Oxford for the past 7 years.

My role has been to support their decision makiing and planning in many different areas of the business, but predominantly relating back to the numbers in the business, including the obvious turnover and margins, but also reviewing the underlying numbers such as covers, average sale value, service scores, staff turnover and  to name a few.

This last week, we were looking at the seasonal flow of their business, highlighted by the recent visitors to Oxford for the open day at the Universities.

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Invited to speak in London

I am pleased to have been invited back again to speak at this years conference of the Institute of Certified Bookkeepers in London on 7th November.

Last year, I spoke on the subject of Strategic and Tactical Marketing and was voted the 'the most popular speaker'.  This year, my talk will be covering the 7 effective steps to grow your bookkeeping business.

www.entrepreneursmentor.co.uk