It’s a rare business that can survive, let alone prosper, these days without getting their name out in front of customers. If you’re interested in growing your business with marketing, what options are there out there for you?

First, understand what you have that’s better and different

Many businesses consider “price” as their big differentiator – and there’s no problem with that. Plenty of companies have survived and prospered over the years by getting their goods and services out the door cheaper than some or all of their competitors.

But could there be something different and better about your offering? Before you spend money on advertising, our first suggestion would be to look at this.

Let’s say you develop apps for mobile phones. And let’s say that, beforehand, you worked as a mechanic in a garage. But your passion had always been techie and you left the overalls behind for a suit and a desk.

Instead of offering just a generic app to any old company you were trying to sell to, you were offering a bespoke solution that helped people find out what was wrong with their car or van and told them to take it to a mechanic at that particular garage if something needed urgent attention.

A generic, one-size-fits-all app offers features. A well-thought-out app targeted to the problems and opportunities in a particular business sector offer benefits – the things you can make this app do will offer massive advantages to companies in that sector.

Something that offers benefits is always more attractive to a potential buyer that something that offers features. Think “this product features” versus “the benefit of this product to your garage is…”.

Reaching out to customers with your new benefit-laden product

Now your feature-based product is now a benefit-rich goldmine for garages, you can reach out to garage owners through the five main types of marketing– direct, networking, exhibiting, trade/niche, and blanket.

Direct marketing is advertising where you choose who sees, reads or hears your adverts – think of email marketing, postal marketing, and telephone marketing.

You can buy lists of garages from list owners or list brokers. These companies will, following your guidance, help you select the types of garages you want by size and location.

Burton Beavan tip – make sure that you get a guarantee from your list broker that their list is GDPR compliant. Please ensure also that if you’re calling businesses, they are not on the Corporate Telephone Preference Service (CTPS) opt-out list.

With networking, you attend get-togethers where you can swap business cards, introduce yourself, and share information with fellow attendees.

Before signing up, you can always ask the organisers how many people from your target audience (in this cases, garage owners) attend. Using that figure, you can make up your own mind as to whether this offers you value for money.

Exhibiting can be taking out a stand at a trade fair or an expo.

Trade fairs are targeted towards specific sectors. For a show targeting the motor trade, the type of person you’ll meet at a fare will play a big part in the decision-making process for purchasing services like apps.

Attending trade fairs can cost your company thousands of pounds. So always be careful to make sure your costs are controlled from the start.

Trade/niche advertising involves appearing on newsletters and websites linked to a specific industry or interest, for example garages and the motor trade.

Our app designer with the benefit-rich app for consumers giving them advice on whether their car needs servicing and directing them to a specific garage may choose to advertise or sponsor a magazine or a website specifically aimed at decision-makers in the motor trade.

Blanket marketing is the way to contact thousands (sometimes tens of thousands) of people at once. Blanket marketing can be national, local or centred on personal characteristics (gender, income bracket, interests, and so on).

Blanket advertising includes newspapers, leaflets, buying space on Google and Facebook, radio and television, and so on.

Although blanket advertising is the cheapest form of marketing per person reached, it is also the least precise. If you took out an advert in your local free newspaper, only a handful of up to 100,000 readers may even want or need a solution like yours.

Costing up advertising

There’s a relatively simple way of finding out how much a method of advertising needs to bring in before you break even or make a profit.

First, you have to find your net profit level. So, for every £1,000 you turn over, how much of that is profit after all of your costs? Ignoring VAT here, let’s say you make £100 clear profit or 10%.

Now, factor in all the costs you’ll incur by your chosen form of advertising, like:

• space (whether in a newspaper, on a website, or at an exhibition),
• materials (brochures, leaflets, promotional items, etc),
• marketing and admin staff costs (in-house, for example getting someone to cold-call telesales data, design the adverts, administer the campaign’s execution)
• sales staff costs (if you’re exhibiting, factor in the cost of what your salespeople would normally sell on these days that they’re at the exhibition),
• distribution costs (for example, with leaflets), and
• outsourcing (for example, mail fulfilment houses, telemarketing centres).

Add all the costs together and then divide by your net profit level. So, if you were going to spend £1,000 on Google and you were making 10% net profit, divide £1,000 by 10% (or 0.1) and you would need £10,000 in sales to cover your costs.

Help with marketing

If you want to grow through marketing and advertising, speak to us about any ideas you have or any suggestions a potential marketing and advertising company partner has and we can cost them up for you.

Call the Burton Beavan team on 01606 333 900 or email us at hello@burtonbeavan.co.uk.