The key is to focus on factors the company can control and leverage the elements, resources and people that already exist.
This means pinpointing specific actions related to advertising, marketing, selling and promotion. Today, let’s focus on the first two functions.
Advertise
ABC Company has advertised sporadically for the past year. They do have six current, usable ads in their ad bank and a pre-paid advertising account with a weekly business publication. Briefly:
- Begin advertising immediately
- Use size, placement and cost to determine frequency
- At minimum, run one ad per week for six consecutive weeks
- Ideally, run one ad per week for at least nine consecutive weeks
- Use every committed ad dollar without incurring additional costs
- Rotate through all six ads or alternate two or three with the greatest immediate appeal
Market
General marketing efforts aren’t designed to produce instant results. Return on investment can be quicker if these efforts are highly targeted, simple to create and easy to implement. Briefly:
- Commit to contacting every customer in the database at least once every four weeks
- Create a simple email campaign that ties into and leverages the ad campaign
- Use sales revenues to identify the top 20% of customers
- Tailor a contact campaign to this top tier
- Create blog posts to tickle interest in select products and services related to the season or current business demands
- Use social media channels to promote hot products, new services, special offers and items of interest
In part 3 of How Do You Jumpstart Sales?, we’ll look at specific sales and promotion activities that can contribute to a quick turnaround. Meanwhile, if you have suggestions and fixes that have worked for you in similar circumstances, don’t hesitate to share them.