Improve your Brand’s Perception and Position now; don’t wait for the “storm’ to pass.

Some simple steps to improve and enhance your brand using some straight forward Direct Marketing Metrics.

While speaking with many business owners over the past months I have heard too many stories of the business “hunkering down” and waiting for the storm to pass.  This is the best time, in fact, to spend a little time and resources to understand why your customers do business with you as opposed to your competitor and what could you do now to take more share.  Such activity is not expensive, yet it has potential to pay off handsomely if executed and followed up in a methodical manner.  So what am I talking about?

 What could you do now to ensure your business retains and expands its leadership position in the marketplace?   

My recommendation would be to first profile your customer base.   This requires answers to a few key questions including:

• ·         Why do your customers buy from you? 

• ·         What do customers think your brand stands for? 

• ·         Why did the customer purchase from you as opposed to one your competitors? 

• ·         How many of your customers intend to purchase from you in the future?

These profiling questions would best be answered at your customer segmentation level (i.e. Best Customers versus Marginal Customers).   To create such segmentation please refer to my article on the Generic RFM Scoring methodology.  

If you already have this kind of information from customer primary research studies you are well on the way to securing your position in the marketplace.  If not, I have the expertise to get this process moving for you if you wish.

Having years of experience analyzing customer transactions in marketing databases I would then want to analyze the following marketing metrics for the buyers profiled above:

1. How many customers purchased from you in the last 12 months?
2. How many times did they order and what was the average order size?
3. How many new customers did you acquire last year? 
4. How many of last year’s new customers are you expecting to buy this year?
5. How have these metrics changed in the past few years?
6. What marketing programs have the most impact on these metrics?

Answers to these metrics questions coupled with the customer profiling above would give your brand a clear road map of how to grow the customer base at rates much greater than your competitors.  While at the same time you would have improved information on key metrics driving your business.  The metrics are critical in setting appropriate benchmarks for ROI goals on your marketing programs.  In that way you will have a better and timelier understanding of what is working and what is not.  Then you can expand the programs that work and fix or stop programs that are not working.

Doing these things now is critical, especially if your competitors are “hunkering down” and waiting for the storm to pass.  For when the competitors raise their heads again you will have secured a more defensible position in the marketplace from which they will be required to play catch up, which almost always is a more difficult and costly exercise.