As accountants that focus on growth, and business owners ourselves for 20+ years, we’ve talked a lot about marketing!

There is no silver bullet to attract customers. The most effective starting point is to get clear on the level of business you actually need to bring in to reach your sales targets, then work out who your target market is and where you’ll find them.

Then it’s ‘just’ a case of identifying the best ways to get in touch with those people or to get onto their radar at the right time, to test different marketing methods and see what works for your business.

It sounds so simple!

The things is, there are dozens of different ways to promote your products and services, and more are added all the time!

• Social media was unheard of when we started out as business owners in 2002, but it has been brilliant for us over the years.
• Corporate use of TikTok grew dramatically during the pandemic, though we’re still convinced it’s not for us!
• Direct Mail can still be beneficial, if it’s used well and followed up; we don’t see very much ‘real’ post these days, so tend to take notice of it when we do.
• Picking up the phone to your existing customers and catching up can bring new opportunities, just because you’ll know more about their needs, and you’ll come back into their minds.
• Video can require a bravery pill, but allows you to build relationships with every who watches it; they’ll feel that they know you when you may not even have spoken.
• It used to be possible to have a business without a website, now you really need to be focussed on the speed of that site, or Google won’t even show it. That’s ignoring the SEO…
• Ads on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram alongside Google adwords, retargeting and analytics can all add up to be a massive distraction unless you know they’re going to bring a return on the investment of time and money.

A few pointers:

• Whatever combination of marketing activity you use in your business, it’s essential that you measure the effect of each one. If you don’t know what’s actually working, you won’t know which to continue, increase or stop quickly!

• It’s easy to be attracted by the ‘bright and shiny’ options, but monitoring how effective different options may help to remind you that spending more time or money on an activity that works may be far more beneficial than investing time in developing something new.

• Keep your ideal customers in mind when you’re developing your marketing materials. You’re not promoting your product or service to yourself, so you need to put yourself in their shoes. You may have more than one type of target customer, or avatar. In which case, you may need to appeal to them in different ways.

This section of our Information Centre deals with a lot of the points above, and a whole lot more!

Over the years we’ve spent a lot of time (and money!) learning about marketing, and have shared our knowledge with many businesses, so we have a good feel for what can work and what may be best left to others. For example, TikTok really isn’t likely to be for us, but for an indy business selling to the right demographic, it could be fabulous.

If you’d like to discuss your approach with us, particularly around meaning and monitoring your marketing, please get in touch; we find marketing fascinating and are always happy to discuss ideas and to know what’s working for different businesses. We also know a variety of people that can help you refine your marketing, or to whom you can outsource some or all of your activity, and are happy to make introductions if they’d be helpful.

The first section below includes links to our ‘Rebound Resources’, designed during Lockdown to help businesses rebound after months of restrictions and, in many cases, prolonged periods of closure. Whilst we hope that there is no return to those dark days, the value in these resources remains. The loss of a key customer or similar challenge can create comparable pressure in a business, and these resources would be just as relevant.