By Mark Hinder, Responsible for Business Development Programmes, Ricoh Graphic Communications, Ricoh Europe
Do you know what value your business brings to its clients? If you do then how does this align with your marketing mission? What difference will marketing make to your organisation? Why should you embrace marketing to promote your value? When should you start your marketing? Who should you be marketing your value to? How will you know if you need a marketing plan to deliver an effective marketing solution?
If you can’t answer these questions now you will be able to after reading the Guide to Modern Marketing series published by Ricoh Europe.
Modern Marketing, the first book of six, is an introduction to marketing for busy businesses. It has been created to help Print Service Providers (PSPs) understand why it is so vitally important to get to know their audience, build their brand, create a marketing plan, develop client engagement to achieve real business growth.
Organisations like print businesses can now identify, target, profile, engage and convert clients using a rich variety of valuable marketing tools and channels to drive long term business success.
Marketing can help:
Match your businesses value to your clients’ needs.
Anticipate client choice and actions.
Find new clients, and effectively talk to them.
Develop client conversations into sustained sales.
Create product and service awareness, at the right time, in the right place.
Key to this a clear and effective strategy that delivers by building a strong brand, developing accurate data, and defining specific targeting. Important too is creating a welcoming journey for new clients that fosters loyalty and even turns them into brand ambassadors. Supporting this is relationship marketing that values existing relationships while gathering valuable insights.
This can help shape strategic development. It can also increase understating of who your clients are and how they can continue to grow with you and you with them.
The book suggests keeping it simple by doing only what is necessary, remaining relevant, being focused, and not marketing to everyone. It highlights the 80%/ 20% rule that suggests most companies’ profits come from 20% of their customers and why it is important to nurture that 20%.
It also explores why a business, that has been operating for several years, should consider marketing now, especially if there has not been a plan before. And how marketing can help actively grow markets, take a brand proposition forward, energise a business and create real opportunities.
Marketing helps keep loyal clients engaged and involved, especially when there are competitors keen for their business too. It gives operations the means to establish who they are and tell everyone how they’re different. It finds and keeps clients, is cost effective, trackable, measurable, specific and creates a response.
Marketing is persuasion. It is your business story and it changes opinion.
How will you use it to inform your clients and shape your future?
The other books in the series, titled Audience, Brand, Vision, Engage and Optimise, will be explored in future blogs. Together they provide a practical, structured, and enjoyable route to business growth and profitability.
They support the completion of a tailored marketing plan with the Ricoh Modern Marketing Canvas. The canvas comprises four sections – Your Business, Your Marketing, Your Customers and Budget, and is a core part of Ricoh’s EDGE business development consultancy service. With the learning from the six books, each section of the canvas can be completed to provide a full picture of business marketing attributes, marketing structure and marketing audience.
www.ricoh-europe.com
