Marketing

Marketing Strategy

It is fundamental to have a marketing strategy or plan in place before you invest money into any form marketing activity. Next Level offer a series of different marketing planning packages to suit any business:

The top level is a full marketing strategy development program which involves carrying out in-depth research and analysis to create a detailed marketing strategy and implementation plan for your business.

Mid-tier level is our fast track marketing action plan which takes you step by step through the process of developing a marketing plan for your business. This is a quick way to implement some fundamental principles and start generating a much better return on investment

The most basic level is a marketing healthcheck session that analyses how your business is currently marketing itself and makes some recommendations on the key areas you should be focusing on.

All of the above processes, to varying degrees, will help you define and segment your core business offering, identify and understand your key target markets and evaluate the external influences on the business, including your competitors.

Relationship Marketing

The easiest, quickest and most cost effective source of increased revenue and referral business is through existing customers, and yet the vast majority of businesses stop marketing once someone becomes a customer.

Yes, we may carry on sending special offers and so on but we tend to forget to keep reminding them of our USP, our full product offering, the added value we provide, new additions to our offering…all key elements of the marketing we do to prospects. And historical data has proven that it costs six times more to sell something to a prospect than to sell that same thing to an existing customer!

Next Level can help you develop specific strategies to strengthen your relationships with customers, ensuring that they not only continue to buy as much as possible and as often as possible, but they also become powerful advocates of your business.

Test and Measure

John Wanamaker (US retailer) once famously said ‘Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half’. Although a light hearted comment, unfortunately this is all too common an approach to marketing in SME’s.

Would you buy new machinery or equipment and then not use it? Would you pay an employee irrespective of if they ever came to work? Would you pay a supplier vast sums of money without ever checking that their goods actually arrived? Would you buy shares in another company and not care if they went up or down in value?

Of course not, and yet the vast majority of SME’s spend money on marketing activities without ever measuring if they have generated a return on their investment.

Next Level can help you understand how to test and measure your marketing activity. If the results show that something is not providing a return on investment then we can help you refine the activity to improve results, or simply stop wasting money in that area and focus your energy and resources on developing those areas that are providing a return on investment.