Marketing Ideas and Inspiration

Marketing Focus – Understanding Your Competition

In order to successfully compete with companies who are offering similar products or services to the same target market you need to understand who they are, what they are doing, how you differ, how you are the same and what differentiates you. Many people want to hide from the competition and are hostile towards them, but it’s really a case of better the devil you know – especially in such a small place as Marbella. We have an unusual opportunity to personally get to know our competitors as part of networking events and share ideas and information in a transparent way. There are often ways that you can collaborate with these companies and having a positive relationship with them will always be beneficial.

Gaining Competitor Intelligence

Competitor Intelligence is all around you and normally free and easy to get hold of, once you fully understand what it is your competitiors are doing you can more clearly evaluate your own performance, identify competitors strengths and weaknesses which should be addressed or exploited, learn from what they are doing, identify new customer groups you may not have thought of and improve both business planning and sales forecasting.

Here are 10 questions you should try and answer about your competition:

Free Marketing Guide

Shaw Marketing Services are launching a new Facebook campaign, where we are going to be giving away a free marketing guide to our Facebook fans. Each month we will be giving away an exciting guide not to be missed, full of useful tips and advice helping...

Marketing Focus – Email Marketing

Email marketing is a great way of engaging with your customers while promoting your business by providing regular updates about your business. If the newsletter is written correctly then it can encourage people to take action such as visiting your website, buying your product or contacting...

Look out for a Specsavers’ Morph near you

Specsavers Opticas' are having fun raising awareness of their brand by sending out morphs to events and in the local areas around the store. These little green men are likely to have some excellent offers with them and make a great photo opportunity so make sure...

Marketing Focus – How to delight your customers

Your customers are the best and worst promotional tool you have available to you.

Happy customers can become your advocates, spread the word about your company and give very powerful personal recommendations and referrals.

Unfortunately, unhappy customers are normally more vocal than happy ones and are likely to complain to many of their friends and family, giving you bad press. Now that social media allows every consumer a powerful and loud voice, it is even more important to make sure you delight your customers and give them a wonderful experience, no matter how big or small you are.

Here are some dos and don’ts for keeping clients happy:

Marketing Focus – The Importance of Networking

Networking is one of your key Costa del Sol marketing tools, and when starting or running a business here, it’s highly recommended to take advantage of the opportunities networking has to offer. The main benefits of networking are:

• Raise awareness of you and your company

• Allows you access to experienced business people to ask advice and get practical support if you’re new to the area

• Builds a network of trusted suppliers who you can turn to

• Builds trust in you and therefore your business

• Gives you marketing opportunities to give speeches, publicise your business via their website or newsletters and of course meet new people at each and every meeting

• Is a great opportunity to meet like-minded people and build your social network in a new place

Presentation How to Promote your business cost-effectively 22/09

I will be giving a presentation for members of the Costa Women on Thursday 22nd September from 8pm to 10pm at Avenue Cafe in central Marbella. This is a free event to help local business women understand more about the marketing options open to them...

Marketing Focus – The 80/20 rule

Working out where your profit is coming from is a great tool for increasing productivity

We believe that there’s no point spending money on marketing in Spain before you know how profitable you are, and where exactly your profit is coming from.This is why a technique such as the 80/20 rule is so useful…

What is the 80/20 rule?

The 80/20 rule is a helpful and simple way of identifying your important customers, your most profitable products and services, and the strengths and weaknesses of your business.

But don’t worry you don’t have to be great at maths….

How much should something cost and what does that say about it?

When you’re starting a new business or bringing a new product to the market one of the first things to consider is how much to charge for it.

The right pricing strategy is crucial to the success of any business. In its most simple form you need to define the boundaries between too cheap and too expensive – too low it won’t be profitable and too high and people won’t buy it. However, there’s so much more to it than that of course. The price you give your product or service will position itself in people’s mind as either the budget option, the middle of the road or the “quality” or the “premium” option so you need to decide where your product should sit in that pricing hierarchy.

Some clever people have made a fortune repackaging a fairly average product as premium and got away with selling it as more expensive purely through marketing. Stella Artois’ “reassuringly expensive” slogan is a good example of this. It really depends on your market and your consumer whether or not you can get away with positioning a product as premium, so do your research carefully before you take this route.

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