The Marketing Menu

For any business, getting in front of a large crowd of people who are your target market is a great opportunity. Exhibitions are a great way to do this but, unfortunately, they can be prohibitively expensive. If you do decide to invest your time and budget in this form of marketing, there are some do’s and don’ts to help you maximise your investment.

In this week’s podcast, we give you 21 Ways to Win at Exhibitions, such as:

How to use body language and eye contact to your advantage

What kind of questions to ask a prospective customer

What language to use to promote your business

How to get rid of time-wasters

 

 

In this week's podcast, we focus on some marketing basics and discuss how to build a product portfolio. By this we mean identifying different products, how they suit different audiences and how you can exploit some of the obstacles that may get in our way.

As marketers, it is our job to identify and outsmart the obstacles by always considering:

* Our profitability

* Our market. So what is happening to the markets you operate in, are you dependent on main customers, or are you dependent on technology perhaps

* What are your competitors doing?

* And how are you preparing for change, which could relate to all manner of things like political, environmental or customer changes for example

We also talk about popular marketing theory, without getting too technical, and the tools you can use to help you review where your products are in their life cycle to see how you could improve sales and allow you to  identify obstacles so you could put in place a strategy that may allow you to continue selling that product or service a little longer.

 

When it comes to marketing a retail business, there is no doubt we are facing challenging times. That said, we still meet many retailers who believe that merely having a presence on a High Street is enough when it comes to marketing their business, but there is so much more to do.

In this podcast, we explore:

* Ideas on building loyalty with customers

* The six reasons why retail business is struggling

* Alternatives to cutting prices

* Raising your profile

* Adding customer value

 

We've revisited some of the research we undertook when we started The Marketing Menu Podcast and one of our most popular subjects was Pricing and how to deal with cheaper rivals. Although many of our past subject areas have looked at positioning or storytelling, which undoubtedly relate to this, we thought we would revisit one of our earlier podcasts when we looked at the do’s and don’ts of pricing, which is also relevant.

In this podcast, we:

* recap on some basic pricing principles

* discuss techniques smaller businesses can use to build a pricing structure

* offer alternatives to cutting prices

 

You may think that Market Research only applies to big businesses and organisations who have teams of people beavering away on their behalf. But for those just starting out or looking to grow, finding out information that could affect the success of their business is even more essential.

Basically, the better informed you are about your competitors, your market, your products and services and where they sit amongst others, and how the markets can change, the better prepared you are to make the right decisions for your business.

In this podcast, we talk about:

* the basics of market research and why it's vital

* the resources you can access to do your research

* different methods of market research such as questionnaires and telephone & face-to-face interviews

* how to pull all the information together to produce a report for you to action

Products and services don’t sell themselves. All too often though we hear of startup businesses who allocate precious little to their marketing budget, who then face critical decisions when their business fails to take off.

It’s one of the biggest contributing factors to business failure. It’s so easy to think of marketing as a luxury when you’re working to a tight budget but it is so important.

In this podcast, we talk about:

How to calculate what your marketing budget should be

Where your precious resources should be spent

What your marketing messages should be achieving

Ideas for 'free' activities

With the constant noise about GDPR, the new General Data Protection Regulations, which come into force on 25 May 2018, we are re-running our podcast from December when we met with Mark Gracey, a digital compliance business expert, to discuss the implications for marketers from a marketing perspective.

This episode considers an explanation about what GDPR is and why it is being brought in.  Data protection applies to all businesses. So it doesn't matter if you're a one-man band or a global corporate - data protection rules still apply.

We explain how GDPR is actually going to affect marketing practices in particular and whether there are any confusions when it comes to good marketing practices as there are other regulations that apply. One of the key things that's changing that a lot of people are really focused on is the rules around collecting consent for the purposes of processing and that's very important if you're collecting prospect data for marketing purposes. But in a world of marketing compliance, it's partly about data protection and protecting that data that you’re managing but it's also about privacy regulations, which control how will you use that data in an electronic marketing perspective.

We identify how GDPR doesn't necessarily relate to what we may call good marketing practice and what in essence this covers.

GDPR has ramifications for marketing people but, in a general everyday sense, it covers every aspect of management and processing of personal data. So that's data that identifies your customers, your clients, your employees, or any other individual - it’s not just about consent and marketing. Data protection has much wider ramifications for business. It's about everything that you do with personal data. So if you have data that identifies an individual, be it a client or an employee or a potential customer, that data is protected by data protection and therefore GDPR applies. So there are much wider ramifications for businesses than just the marketing aspects and businesses need to think about the security of that data, how they use that data and how will they also meet the requirements of the rights of the individuals whose data it is. The big key thing about GDPR is it's about accountability. Can you as a business demonstrate your compliance?

Finally, we offer some top tips for listeners in relation to GDPR and marketing so that you can ensure that your business will be compliant. There's lots going on in terms of data protection but also in a marketing world, we're expecting the new privacy regulations in Europe and the UK that will perhaps change some of the rules around electronic marketing or have a wider scope.

The episode also links to a number of useful sites where marketers can gain further clarification and material on how to fit GDPR terms into their business going forward, in a GDPR world.

 

 

 

 

It takes just a quick glance, maybe three seconds, for someone to evaluate you when you meet for the first time. And in that short amount of time, the other person forms an opinion about you based on your appearance, your demeanour, your mannerisms, how you are dressed and your body language.

These first impressions can be nearly impossible to reverse or undo, making those first encounters extremely important because they set the tone for all the relationships that follow.

So, whether they are in your career or personal life, it's important to know how to create a good first impression. In this podcast, we give you some suggestions for how you can do this by looking at:

how to be confident

the preparation you can do beforehand

what to say when you first meet

being an individual

Building trust in business with people is often easy with those we have a natural affinity with, often people we perceive as being a little like us. In business, though the challenge is to build this all-important trust with others who may be a little different to us. So how do we break through these barriers and get more from our relationships, be it in business or in our personal worlds?

Let's look at how we can develop better relationships through active listening and effective questioning techniques. We also take a look at how body language plays a vital role in understanding how well we are communicating. 

In this podcast, we discover more on:

 

Developing the skills needed to build business relationships

How listening techniques are just as important as questioning

How by knowing more about ourselves, we can change the way we relate to other people

How by watching the facial expressions, gestures, and posture of others we can spot how we are engaging successfully

How good communicators use the KISS principle.

We also make an exclusive listener offer of 10% off The Marketing Menu Courses if you use Coupon PODCAST on the checkout page for any of our courses, enjoy.