R.A.P.I.D Marketing Model and its importance to YOUR Business.

Here are some pointers on how important our RAPID Marketing Model and how it gives impact and value to your business.

RESEARCH

The purpose of research is to understand. It’s very difficult to make the right marketing decision if you don’t understand your market or customers. When was the last time you surveyed your customers? Click here for some tips on researching customers
Would your customers refer you? You can find this out by running what is called a Nett Promoter Survey

Imagine you were a pioneer into a new territory. The first thing you would do is look around and find out where the food, water and shelter was. Research is just like that. In a new market, you need to know the lay of the land before you can operate successfully. Click here for more information

The golden question – where did you hear about us? If you and your staff asked this of every new customer – you’d know exactly what marketing to do in the future.

The world is seemingly awash with information. And ways to market your business. Research helps you sift through the information and choose the smarter ways to get to your target audience

ANALYSE

What are you good at? What needs improvement in your business? A SWOT Analysis is a tool you can use to quickly analyse your business and understand it better. Click here to download a template

What will happen in the future? Imagine you were driving down the road and you saw a random breath test van up ahead. Immediately you could see into the future and know you might get tested. Analysing your market and looking for trends and signs just down the road can help you prepare for the future in your marketing.

The purpose of analysing your business is to sift through all the chaff and find the golden kernels. The important data about your market, yourself and your customers that will put you ahead of your competition and allow you to target your efforts for greater return. Find out more by clicking here

Analysis – the process of pulling together information and building intelligence. Smart business owners analyse. Dumb ones jump to conclusions and make assumptions. Which one are you? Click here to get smarter now.

As a child you might have worked out the best way to get something from your parents was to help them. Or you might have cried. Either way, you analysed the situation and formed a method that was successful. Analysing your business is just the same – it’s finding out the situation and working out a solution based on intelligence gathered. However, crying probably won’t get customers to buy from you!!!

PLAN

Planning your marketing over a period of months or a year is simply smart business practice. Establishing your budget, your campaigns and your measurements. Deciding who you are targeting. A good strategy has budget, goals and resources. Only 20% of SME’s have a written plan. You can do better than that – be one of the 20% with a plan and be more successful

Goals must be specific – how many customers from which campaign, by when – timely, specific and measurable. This is often called a SMART objective – click here for your free template on SMART Objectives
IMPLEMENT

Marketing program – make sure every marketing program you decide to do has a timeframe, a cost and a measurement. That way you’ll know what you get out of it. If you can’t measure it, don’t do it

90-day plan – a good way to bridge the gap between no plan and a full marketing plan is to operate on a 90-day plan. Plan out all your marketing for 90 days, implement it and measure it. Adjust and then do another 90-day plan. 4 of these and you’ll have a year worth of marketing and knowledge about what works in no time.

Ad-hoc – if you can avoid it, don’t do ad-hoc marketing. This is defined as the spur of the moment – unplanned. Just because a media rep offers you cheap advertising doesn’t mean it’s going to be effective advertising. Plan it out. Measure it. If you want to trial something go ahead, but make sure you have measures in place. And that the marketing opportunity does target your ideal customer.

Never book one off advertising in any print media – you will see very poor results with one-off advertising.

If you have a choice, always go for more direct communication with a known individual – existing customer or prospect – the smaller your budget the more direct you need to be. And the more you need to measure every single $ spent.

Marketing Mix – never put all your eggs in one basket. Choose 2 or 3 marketing programs to test together and don’t invest your entire marketing budget into an ‘opportunity’ until you’ve tested it with a pilot campaign. Never commit to long term ‘contracts’ no matter how cheap – if it doesn’t work you’ll spend the rest of the contract kicking yourself

DETECT

You must must must measure every marketing program – whether it is buying a promotional item, sponsoring a community club, sending out direct mail, setting up a Facebook page. Ask the question – how am I going to know if I’ve got something out of it. Set up measures of how many leads, how many conversions, how much income. But do measure. Because if you can’t work out how to measure it, you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place

The golden question – if you ask every new customer where they heard about you – you have the simplest measure of marketing possible – it immediately tells you what marketing channel has stuck in the customer’s mind and that got them to act.

Survey – if you’ve never asked customers the golden question before there is nothing stopping you calling some of them and asking it now. Of course, if you already know the answer then simply tally up the sources of business and then get to work on repeating the successful actions.

Word of mouth. If you get a referral from a customer – reward them with a thank you – this could be a simple thank you or a small gift. Thank you’s work much better than ‘pleases’. By ‘pleases’ we mean incentives to refer. Word of mouth is the holy grail for any marketer – it’s the cheapest form of advertising getting a warm lead. So reinforce this by acknowledging the referral and then doing your damnedest to look after both the referrer and the new customer. After all, the referrer has put their reputation on the line by referring you too…

Lead Funnel – you should know at any stage how many leads you’ve received in the last week or month, how many you converted, what the lead cost in terms of marketing $ and time. A lead funnel tells you how much business is on the horizon, how much you have now and where to target your marketing – all in one simple set of information. So keep your lead funnel up to date and review it regularly. It is the measure any smart business owner knows.

Visit this website to know more about this strategy: http://bluefrogmarketing.com.au