Marketing on-demand

 

If you’re in a sales-led company – and you’ve taken on the role of marketing – then we could be just what you’re looking for, a marketing resource that you can just switch on or off.

For our bigger customers we supplement the work of their incumbent agencies, bringing specialist skills on a project basis.

At the other end of the scale we act as a completely outsourced marketing department, helping our customers create the brief, present at board level and develop campaigns for focused outcomes.

Your 1^st Objective

We align marketing services in a way that supports your sales objectives. We are not a specialist agency and you’ll find that we deliver unbiased, agnostic advice.

We look at typical sales and how they are achieved. Then we suggest marketing services to make those sales easier, more frequent and more likely to succeed. Later we support your engagement with key accounts for repeat sales.

And beyond sales support, we look to build your brand’s value, improve engagement with customers and communicate internally to make your workplace even more productive.

Turn us on!

You can visit the website to see what we’ve achieved for others, but it’s what we can do for you that matters. Why not call us in for a chat or to talk to one of our reference customers?

01628 472755

 

10 ways to lock in existing customers

First, secure your base.

 

 

Forget new customers – the trick to growth is keeping your existing customers on board. Here are 10 ideas on how to lock them in.

 

 

1. Learning from history – Clausewitz, a Prussian soldier and military theorist who stressed the political and psychological aspects of war. His most important rule of war was to ‘secure your base’! American marketing pundits often use the analogy of war and quote military strategists like Marcus Aurelius to illustrate how marketing works. And quotations from the ancient Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu. from his famous work The Art of War crop up regularly inHollywood movies and – most likely daily – in boardrooms around the world.
2. Give them priority – securing your base often becomes the unsexy poor relation in terms of the audiences you need to reach with marketing. It needs support at board level.
3. Integrate CRM – while CRM systems are brilliant at providing marketing intelligence, using them to contact existing customers must be framed using local knowledge. This means continuous co-ordination with account-facing staff to ensure the customer sees value.
4. Keep it relevant – just because you have something new to say doesn’t mean that you should waste your customers’ time with it. Make sure your account handlers and sales people are briefed up and leave it to them to open the conversation. Then back them up with tools to take those conversations further if customers bite.
5. Give them reasons to stay – conduct high profile customer satisfaction research that makes it hard for them to say goodbye. These survey results endorse the relationship.
6. Flatter their good judgement – individually targeted mailings that name names and talk about customer success can go viral and get you invited to pitch in other areas of customers’ businesses.
7. Make it personal – use third parties to interview key players and reflect their words in your own marketing. It shows that you’re listening to the top people and aligning your offering according to their business objectives
8. Inform customers – keeping your customers in the loop about your offering is more than just a courtesy, it’s a vital part of sales support and can open up accounts in ways that direct selling alone cannot.
9. Support your sales people – existing business is sometimes left solely in the hands of sales people who prefer to keep ‘marketing’ out of the equation. This protective attitude means that while relationship selling continues customers are constantly receiving marketing messages from your competition, eroding or questioning your value and position.
10. Fight for budgets – too often budget emphasis is placed on delivery of new business and lead generation. And we all know the cost differential of bringing on new customers versus the cost of retaining existing customers don’t we?

This article first appeared in Real Business on 27 July 2012

http://realbusiness.co.uk/advice_and_guides/10-ways-to-lock-in-existing-customers

Branding: The seven ages of B2B marketing

 

B2B marketing has changed virtually beyond recognition in the last 60 years, and with the pace of change accelerating  Alex Blyth charts the evolution, and Nic Ricketts, director of marketing agency 1st Objective recalls just how labour-  intensive it once was.

 

Read the full article here.

a&o Systems and Services: Key account marketing

Our new thought leadership piece for client a&o Systems is a departure from their usual approach.

New Systems boss Kevin Flynn wanted to challenge the audience with a more opinionated piece while introducing some key members of the team.

The opening and click through stats – so far – show that it’s working.

Click the link to read the articles in full a&oBusinessAdvantage

a&o Systems and Services: Key account marketing

a&o Systems and Services’ very important customer HP, trusts them with huge service and maintenance contracts, for example the Department of Work and Pensions’ 12,000, countrywide, self-service kiosks on a 4.5hr time-to-fix SLA.

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