Internet
marketing consultant
Why choose an internet marketing consultant?
As the owner of a small business, there are a number of occasions when you
might be considering the use of an external internet
consultant.
1. You
are looking for business growth.
2. You are looking to reverse recent
business decline.
3. You are looking to launch new products or services.
4. You feel that the energy you are putting into your business is not
turning into sufficient sales/profits. Your current resources could be more
appropriately targeted.
1. You are looking for business growth
I suppose nearly all businesses are looking for
business growth but perhaps the tactics you have been employing over time have
not been delivering the reults of late. Or perhaps your competitors are
acquiring more new business than you. Marketplaces are constantly changing
shape. There can be a multitude of changes taking place that slowly eat into
the effectiveness of your current marketing spend. An external view of your
current plans could be invaluable.
2. You are looking to reverse recent business
decline
Things are definitelty not going as planned. You could
argue that your reduced profits do not allow you the luxury of employing an
external consultant. This could be a seriously false economy. A short (and
inexpensive) consultation might be of help; perhaps the answer is to cut loose
on certain products and focus on others.
3. You are looking to launch new products or
services
This can very often mean you are entering into new
market sectors or even new markets. It is quite possible that your companies
experience of marketing tactics are totally ineffective in this new area. At
the very least they will be of altered relevance. The development of a clearly
defined (and communicable) competitive edge is invauable and time spent up
front developing this can reap much greater rewards in the long run.
4. You feel that the energy you are putting into
your business is not turning into sufficient sales/profits. Your current
resources could be more appropriately targeted
You may not be spending huge budgets on an area of
your business but the resources in terms of man hours or assets is totally out
of sync with the sales or profits you are generating. problem is crying out for exteVery frustrating. Given
that you have probably already spent a lot of your time trying to resolve this,
this rnal thought.
Marketing must not
be confused with sales.
Marketing must not be confused with
advertising.
Both sales and advertising are but two weapons in the
marketing armoury. The other weapons include tactics such as PR, promotions,
sponsorship, websites, leaflets, etc etc. If you have a well thought-through
and planned marketing strategy it will become quite obvious which weapons
within this vast armoury should be deployed in order for you to hit your
business objectives. Unfortunately, many businesses do not go through this
process and as a consequence continue to invest large sums of money in methods
of promotion which are inappropriate for business goals. And invariably the
company concerned does not have knowledge (let alone expertise) of these other
tactics and hence is unable to do anything different to what it has done for
the past 2, or 5, or 10, or 20 years!
One of the best examples of this is the assumption
that the only element that brings in sales is the face-to-face salesman; and
that the only way to increase sales is to put 'more bums on seats'. The true
cost of an additional salesman in a company is about 3 times the salary, so
this becomes a very expensive strategy to follow.
Perhaps it can only ever
be a salesman who actually takes the order but:
- there are ways of generating more sales lead
- there are ways of generating more qualifiedsales
leads
- there are ways of generating more business from
existing customers
- there are ways of reducing customer reluctance to
purchase
Perhaps the strategy is so successful you only need a
sales order processing department to take incoming telephone orders! That would
improve your profitability I am sure.
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Tel: 01202-257423