marketing success


​Our 5 golden rules start with this thought:

​Good marketing is an investment, rather than a cost
 
In fact, no business can survive for long without good marketing.
 
Ponder on this, everything you do, can directly or indirectly, affect how customers and potential customers perceive you. This includes everything that appears online, on the high street, in the press. Only a small part of what customers see or hear comes directly from you, but it all shapes perceptions of a brand.
 
The implication? Marketing is much, much more than advertising and PR – it is a reflection of your organisation’s values and ways of working. Every touchpoint between customers and your company is therefore part of ‘marketing’: the brand is just the most outward facing aspect of this, but the most powerful brands adhere consistently to core values throughout the business.
 
 
Our five golden rules for successful marketing:
 
1. Understand your customers

It's an obvious starting point, but often it is only undertaken to a superficial level. 

​Understanding customers means getting inside their heads and seeing their motivations and their constraints, how they see your brand and competitors, and how these all differ between different customer segments.
 
2. Make sure you understand your brand

To project a brand to customers it first has to be understood by the owning company and everyone in it. This means having clarity on what the brand stands for and employees that buy into this.
 
3. Adopt a product Company mentality

Marketing is not the same as running a campaign – good marketing brings together all the various strands of communications activity: Digital, above-the-line ad campaigns, below-the-line activities, PR, direct marketing, social networking, customer satisfaction research, and customer complaints; and aligning this with product/service development, pricing and distribution.  It means adopting a 'Product Company mentality. 

​Product companies innovate.  They refresh and improve whatever it is they are selling, both quickly and effectively, and with every new refreshment or improvement they offer customers better value. 
 
4. Create coherence

The aim of marketing should be for customers to love your brand. This way, they will keep using it, be happy to pay what it’s worth, and even become your advocates. The same is true of your communications, it is not enough to just create awareness (which can actually be a bad thing), it needs to engender positive feelings about your brand such that they want to use it (and be seen to be using it).

​At Sambecketts we call this ‘Brand Coherence'
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5. Learn
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All marketing communications activity should be set up to provide metrics by which success can be monitored. Monitoring alone is not enough however, you must be prepared to learn and act on these lessons.
 
If you’d like to know more about these or how Sambecketts can put these into practice, start a conversation with us:

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