£1000 to help you grow

Grants from the Government are available to help you sort out your strategy, get more profitable, streamline your systems and much more.

You can get up to £1000 quite easily and quickly for short term projects that can really make a difference to your business.

The signs are such that we are now expecting a downturn in the economy in 2012, so it’s wise to get everything working at its optimum level now to protect your business as much as possible.

We have helped clients with:

•          Strategy
•          Growth
•          Profitability
•          Cash flow
•          Systems streamlining

We’ve also used the same techniques to create a succession plan to hand over to the next generation,  changed a company’s manufacturing base and created more sales focus, groomed a business for eventual sale,  and found better ways of paying  the owners so that the company’s cash flow is improved.

This grant will be available potentially until March 2012, but it has to be used by then, so apply soon to ensure your business gets the help it needs.

Give me a call to discuss it on 01202 520010 or email nick@hixsons.co.uk

Marketing - the last of the 4P's

Here’s the last of the 4 P’s of marketing – PROMOTION

It all means nothing if the benefit of your product hasn’t been clearly communicated to your target market. This might be a mix of:

Public relations

Advertising

Sales promotion – a short term fix to increase sales, maybe with money off coupons

Personal selling

Direct mail

Internet marketing

You will need a well thought out message strategy. What message are you trying to convey and to whom? How will you deliver the message? Will it be through some branding, design or logos? The message should emphasise the benefit of the product and help the business in positioning the product.

Will you use a push or pull strategy perhaps? A push strategy is where the manufacturer concentrates marketing effort on retailers to convince them to stock the product. A pull strategy is where the business instead concentrates on consumers to create demand. Or some of both?

An old favourite – AIDA. It’s a communication model to aid selling. It’s an acronym for Attention, Interest, Desire, Action. When you are new in the market with your product, you first need Attention. Once you’ve done that how can you hold Interest, through stating benefits etc? Then how do you make your product Desirable? A demonstration, perhaps? The lastly, purchase Action – make it easy to purchase.

As your products move through the 4 stages of a product life cycle, you will need to promote them differently to ensure the best success and longest life of each product.

Introduction – new product, so you need to inform the target customers. You may need quite a bit of effort, with Push and Pull strategies at this crucial phase.

Growth – as the product becomes accepted, you need to work on a strategy of increasing brand awareness to encourage loyalty.

Maturity – brings increased competition, so the business needs to persuade customers to buy theirs and not a rival. Display differential advantage to the target audience to inform them of benefits.

Decline – use a strategy of reminding the customers of the product to slow down the inevitable. You may change the price to increase sales.

You will also want to ensure that you have different products at different stages of their product life cycles, to ensure you don’t have a sudden slump in sales, or cannot meet demand if there is a big increase.

There you are- the 4 P’s of marketing, in as short a form as I can manage it. Our strategy sessions focus a lot on marketing and the pricing conundrum. You just have to ask.