In the resources section we provide an overview of how we can support you in overcoming common business challenges, as well as offering easy to understand definitions of marketing terminology with our marketing jargon buster.
Common Business Challenges
We know that sometimes even knowing what the problem is can feel overwhelming. Outsourced marketing consultancy services can help you with common business challenges, such as:
- Awareness – nobody knows who you are
- Acquisition – people seem to know about you but don’t come to you (they go to the competition), or you want to grow faster!
- Retention/Customer attrition – you win new clients but you can’t keep them
- Maximise use of existing infrastructure – you are busy most of the time but you’d like to increase utilisation up to and beyond capacity and grow your business
- Design – you need a professional ‘look’ to help you play on the same field as the ‘bigger players’
- Do more, better – you do the basics but you’d like your marketing to be more sophisticated
- Product launches – you’d like to launch a new product but are not sure how to go about it. You need a plan you can implement
- Processes/Technology – you’d like to implement some processes or technology (e.g. a CRM solution) to safeguard future sales opportunities and harness your client base
- Specific Project Management – you’d like to invite to tender a new PR, design agency or email marketing service provider, and would like someone to manage the process for you
Perhaps you just need some help and don’t know where to start! Don’t worry, Loud & Clear’s discovery workshop can help you.
Marketing Jargon Explained
Marketing terminology can sometimes feel like a different language, here are some of the terms that you might come across, explained.
CLTV – Customer LifeTime Value
CLTV is a way of determining the value to an organisation of it’s customers. It can be a KPI or metric that an organisation measures itself against. Using this metric as a measure motivates an organisation to look at two things: the length of time that a company keeps it’s customer (the longer the better) and the profit (value) that that a customer gives to the company during it’s relationship (lifetime). Customer longevity has a direct relationship with customer satisfaction. In most cases, the happier a customer is, the longer an organisation will keep them. This makes customer satisfaction and profit, symbiotic. A key reason why a customer-centred approach is so important.
B2B
B2B is an acronym for Business-to-Business, meaning companies who target other companies as their clients, rather than B2C companies who target Consumers: Business-to-Consumer. A hybrid term that has come into fashion more recently is B2B2C, being an organisation that sells to business and direct to consumers.
Campaign
Describes a burst of activity which is grouped together and with a common goal, it usually includes more than one ‘channel’. A campaign is typically made up of several channels and research has shown that campaigns made up of several channels are significantly more successful than those with only one or two (10-25% more effective).
Channel
A marketing Channel is a type of marketing activity. Activities or channels might be: email marketing, PR, website, advertising, adverts, brochures etc.
Event Triggered Actions
This is a phrase which describes what kind of automated activities should take place after a given event. Some people describe this as creating a ‘workflow’. An example of an event triggered action is: A visitor to your website decides to complete the contact/enquiry form – this ‘event’ then triggers an automated email that gets sent immediately to the visitor which says ‘thanks for your enquiry we’ll be in touch soon’.
Frequency
As the name suggests this talks about how often you wish to make contact with your customers or prospects. Frequency is most often applied to large scale direct marketing campaigns or email marketing. It is important to set your ideal frequency in the planning stage so as to not over or under communicate with your target audience.
RFM – Recency Frequency and (Monetary) Value
An analysis method that marketeers use to determine an organisations ‘best’ customers. Identifying which are an organisations best customers is useful as they can then be treated as distinct segment in their own right, perhaps receiving special offers, or products, before others. Additionally these customers can be used to ‘like’ model other customers that with additional marketing become more likely to transition to ‘best’ customers.
High-Net-Worth (HNW) and Ultra High-Net-Worth
This is a term that describes the exceptionally affluent (or wealthy) who live a well-heeled lifestyle. This is a type of demographic group that is targeted with high value goods or services (yachts, power boats, expensive and exclusive car brands, private banking etc.) Typically organisations targeting HNW individuals are referring to people with >£1m of liquid assets.
Media Pack
Is the term given to the details that a media publication (print, online or both) will provide to advertisers with information on its reader base (sometimes this is audited by the ABC audit bureau), who they are, where they are based etc. This can help the advertiser decide if the publication is targeted at the right kind of audience (for example, those likely to buy/respond).
Pop-up Stand
This is usually a 3m x 3m stand that has professionally printed graphics that hook onto a collapsible aluminium frame. The stand is highly portable (fits in the boot of the car usually) and can be available in other shapes and sizes to fit your requirements.
PPC – Pay Per Click
Online advertising where the buyer only pays for adverts which are displayed (served to the user), and which are subsequently clicked on by the recipient/searcher.
Rate Card
The cost of advertising at standard published rates for that publication (online or off), importantly, before negotiating.
Segmentation
This is the methodology you would apply to ‘segmenting’ your target audience into discernable buckets, or segments. Doing this allows you to target people who fall into these buckets in a more specific and productive fashion. A segment might be: High-Net-Worth (see above) females aged 18-30, who live in affluent postcodes in Surrey. This is an example of both demographic (person) and geographic (location) segmentation.
SEO – Search Engine Optimisation
Describes the process undertaken to optimise your website to make it search engine friendly, which in turn will mean that your website will appear higher up in search results for given/specific search terms, usually called ‘keywords’.
SERPs – Search Engine Results Page
The ranking of the various web page links and excerpts that are presented as a result of a keyword search in a search engine (Google, Bing, Yahoo etc.).
USP / Unique Selling Point
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