strategy Archives - Air Marketing

Sync or Swim: Mastering Sales-Marketing Alignment

Posted on 24 May 202424 May 2024 by Hannah Sanders

Discover the secrets to successful collaboration in Sync or Swim: Mastering Sales-Marketing Alignment, a practical guide to enhancing cooperation between sales and marketing teams for improved revenue and efficiency.

Sales and Marketing Teams: Unveiling the Colourful Characters of the Trade
Bridging Brilliance Between Sales and Marketing Teams
What Happens When Sales and Marketing Are Not Aligned?
Syncing Success: Aligning Your Sales and Marketing Tech Stack
Alignment in Action: Success Stories
Building a Culture of Alignment
Your Smarketing Checklist

Get your FREE copy of the E-Book by completing the form below.

Swipe Right: How to Match with Your Ideal Customer Profile

Posted on 20 September 202320 September 2023 by Hannah Sanders

Wouldn’t it be amazing if everyone wanted to buy your product or service? It would certainly cut down on all the time, money and effort needed to discover who your ideal customers are and how they like to be sold to.

In reality, even the most successful companies recognise that they can’t appeal to everyone. If you offer a specialised solution tailored to a specific industry, your customer base might be smaller but fiercely competitive. Alternatively, if your product has broad appeal, you might struggle to reach everyone who could benefit from it.

If you’ve had enough of feeling your way around in the dark and would like someone to turn on the light and show you how to precisely target who you’re going after – this guide is for you.

Swipe Right: How to Match with Your Ideal Customer Profile is a guide by Air Marketing, designed to help you understand what an Ideal Customer Profile is, why it matters and how to build your own, to effectively drive revenue for your business.

Get your FREE copy of the guide by completing the form below.

Building Brands UK Workshop by Shaun Weston: How to Make Your CRM Sexy to Enable You to Achieve Your Marketing Goals

Posted on 31 May 202331 May 2023 by Hannah Sanders

Shaun Weston, the brilliant mind behind our CRM strategy, delivered an incredible workshop at the Building Brands UK event on 23rd May. This workshop was a valuable opportunity for our audience to gain insights into the intricacies of CRM implementation.

For those who were unable to attend the event or wish to revisit the workshop, the recording is now available for you to watch above.

Shaun covered a comprehensive range of topics, including:

– Understanding the fundamentals of a CRM
– Collaborating seamlessly with sales teams through CRM
– Harnessing accurate data on lead and customer journeys to showcase Marketing’s impact
– Gaining actionable insights on MQL conversion through CRM
– Consolidating data from various sources (organic social, paid social, email, PPC, web, landing page design) in one CRM for enhanced effectiveness
– Closing the feedback loop and improving lead quality with CRM data instead of relying on opinions and emotions
– Empowering end users to become early adopters and advocates of CRM

BOOK A TECH STACK AUDIT WITH SHAUN

Your most important relationship is the one that you have with your customers. So why not make it as smooth as possible?

With the right software in place, you can enhance your sales and marketing processes and boost your ROI.

We’re offering a free tech stack audit to help you understand your existing CRM and identify any inefficiencies. We will provide honest, actionable recommendations to optimise your tech stack and improve your business operations. Request your audit by completing the form.

Download: Why a Killer Marketing Strategy is Non-Negotiable

Posted on 24 May 202325 May 2023 by Hannah Sanders

Your marketing strategy is like a roadmap to achieving your business goals. It’s the foundation that supports your success; encompassing a plan that outlines the key steps and tactics required to effectively promote your products or services, connect with your target audience, and ultimately drive desired outcomes.

It needs to answer the following questions:

WHAT? What are your business goals?

WHY? Why should your people choose you over your competitors?

HOW? How will you reach and engage with your audience?

Why a Killer Marketing Strategy is Non-Negotiable is a guide by Air Marketing, designed to provide you with 4 key lessons to help you create a killer marketing strategy, tailored to your business.

From your company’s vision to who you target and how you position yourselves to them, a killer marketing strategy contains everything you need to succeed when it comes to communicating with your customers – both current and prospective!

These 4 lessons include…

Sizing up your competitors
Analysing your business
Getting brutal with your targets
Getting it done!

Get your FREE copy of the guide by completing the form below.

Morning Buzz Meetings – Demotivating or Motivating?

Posted on 29 November 201819 September 2024 by Doug Roots

Motivation can be difficult to achieve in an office environment; hard work can often go unnoticed and the constant pressures of a competitive environment can begin to wear employees down. Research has shown, each day, 10% of employees are absent in call centres due to the lack of appreciation felt in the workplace. This research alone highlights the need, especially in my industry, for touchpoints which allow managers to show their appreciation to their staff, highlight individual achievements and deliver motivational objectives. In this blog post, I will share my experience and tips for achieving the above in one morning meeting.

So, how do you maximise your morning buzz meetings to encourage individuals and create high performing sales teams?

Strategise

43% of highly engaged employees receive feedback at least once a week, however, employee reviews should be happening more often and take less time.

There’s nothing worse than a long-winded ‘motivational’ meeting that is set to demotivate from the offset. It’s therefore important that you plan and prepare; effective buzz meetings should be concise and last no longer than 15 minutes, be armed with your objectives, focus on team wins and pinpoint your collective areas of learning.

Set the tone

Our physical behaviour influences our mental and emotional approach to the day.

Think of ways to get your team moving, have a walking meeting, introduce a quick-fire game or play uplifting music to get the blood pumping. Increased blood flow creates a positive mood, resulting in employees being more equipped to handle objections, take on new challenges and meet personal milestones.

Spotlight success

69% of employees say they would work harder if they felt their efforts were better recognised.

This is the perfect opportunity to feature the activity which you want to encourage. Celebrate your teams wins, even if they don’t lead to a direct sale and avoid focusing on losses. Recognising individual and team achievements has become my common practise, as I know this makes the individuals in my team feel more confident and in turn, pushes them to set bigger targets.

Support and encourage

41% of companies that encourage colleagues to support one another experienced a significant increase in customer satisfaction.

If you want to create a great support network and boost team morale, encourage employees to praise fellow team members, this assures no one’s hard work slips past management and brings the team closer together. If your team is feeling positive it will show in their client conversations, resulting in better relationship building, more sales and higher ROI for the company.

Strengthen from learnings

92% of employees agree that negative feedback, if delivered appropriately, is effective at improving performance.

Remember, the key for creating a great buzz meeting is positivity. Take negative feedback from the day before and turn it into takeaways and learnings for the team to overcome together. If a client isn’t happy with an element of your team’s performance, encourage your team to think of tactics that will better engage them and the people they are selling to.

State the day’s focus

90% of business leaders believe that an engagement strategy could positively impact their business, yet only 25% of them have a strategy in place. It’s therefore no surprise that only 40% of employees are well informed of their company’s goals, strategy, and tactics.

It’s time to hit the reset button and introduce a new action plan for the day. Ask each individual team member, “what do you want to achieve today?” I have found that when the whole team acknowledges personal targets, that individual immediately feels more accountability to meet their goal, success is more likely to be achieved and goals are more likely to align to the company’s bigger picture.

At Air Marketing, we have experienced great success from our initiative to focus on our internal company culture. Achieving £18 for every £1 our clients invest, we are performing higher than the industry’s £11 average. I personally believe this success is down to the time we take out of selling to promote appreciation, individual achievements and team objectives. The culture at Air is one that I haven’t experienced anywhere else, our team’s positive and supportive nature is infectious, thanks to our daily buzz meetings we continue to deliver fantastic results for the companies we support.

Opinion Piece by Annie Blundell – Account Director, Air Marketing

Is your sales strategy focused on your business or your customers?

Posted on 26 September 2018 by Doug Roots

The first rule of customer service is that the customer is always right. Right?

With this in mind, shouldn’t all good business strategies place the customer at the heart of the campaign? Whilst this may seem to be true, it appears companies can sometimes find themselves strategising solely on where the business can go, as opposed to what the business can also do for its customers.

In 2018, 90% of adults in the UK defined themselves as recent internet users, up from 89% in 2017 (Office of National Statistics). Due to the developments in digital media, a customer has everything at their fingertips to make a decision about you before they have even spoken to you, as this information can now be found on social media posts, peer reviews or elsewhere on the internet. It seems that it is no longer always essential for customers to go through sales teams to make a decision on whether or not they want to invest in your product or service. It is therefore essential that when your sales team do engage with your pipeline, they are providing an outstanding experience which focuses on the customer, optimising sales and productivity.

Increasingly, marketers are implementing sales strategies which place their customers at the centre of their business plans, something which is highly recommended by Air. A study by Cap Gemini found that returning customers bring a 23% increase in profits and revenues. It also showed that returning customers spend an average 67% more than a new customer. For this reason, it is essential to create a strategy which better allows you to retain customers as well as encouraging new sales.

It is key to know as much as possible about the behaviours, needs and desires of your business’ customers. When marketers listen to this information they can complement your business strategy by creating customer-focused initiatives which will boost value and profits.

At Air we understand the importance of keeping clients happy and from our initial conversations with clients we get the ball rolling. Our first step, once they decide to go ahead and work with Air, is a strategy meeting which ensures their expert knowledge is kept at the forefront of their campaign; this meeting also enables us to present campaign concepts to reach the best solution for their objectives before we begin dialling. From the outset we want our clients to be happy, confident and informed on what we are doing for them. This level of clarity continues throughout the process, as shown by our client portal. Unique in the industry, the portal allows our clients to track their campaigns in live time providing them with the ability to watch the reactions their prospective customers are having to their products.

Transparency and engagement are essential concepts within our business strategy, as they allow us to maintain trusting relationships between ourselves and our clients. Cap Gemini found that disengaged customers cause a 13% fall in profits. At Air we foster engagement by encouraging our clients to use our office spaces as a base, or to pop in or call and chat with us as and when they feel the need to.

Our client-focused business strategy allows our business to function like a friendship, if we extend a level of familiarity to our clients they will reciprocate by continuing to work with us and in turn referring others to do so too. Receiving recommendations is a key part of our business strategy as future customers are more likely to trust a brand backed by an industry equal or someone they know.

We encourage our clients to leave us testimonials in order to reach out to their community. By allowing our current customers to have a voice and input to our brand it shows prospective clients that we value the opinion of those we work with and want to create strong relationships with them.

For us it isn’t all about the money, it is about the people. To find out more about how we engage with you, your business and your customers please contact us via phone: 0345 241 3038 or via email: contact@air-marketing.co.uk.

Do you actually need a marketing plan?

Posted on 23 August 20187 July 2023 by dukadmin

Perhaps we could look at this question from a different angle, would you start a business without a business marketing plan?

The answer is of course, no! But why should the approach to marketing be any different? You are going to be investing in marketing and if done correctly, marketing will deliver ROI to grow your client base, revenue and ultimately business. It is therefore a critical aspect of your go to market strategy and should be thought through and planned.

Do you appreciate the importance of marketing?

You would expect us to ask this question, we are a marketing agency, we feel that marketing is vital to business success. But let’s explore this question.

For your business to survive, and of course thrive in a market place you have to attract and retain your customers. But if your business never told the market what you offer, why you are better than your competitors, your ethics, why you exist etc, then would customers simply come to you? No doubt a small number may stumble across you, but it’s unlikely that you will attract the number of customers needed for your business to survive.

Marketing is not simply the expensive advertising campaign you see on TV or the brochure that will cost a lot to produce and may quickly become outdated. It’s likely that marketing will have an influence over every touchpoint that your customers experience; from your telephone message, your welcome email, that customer service call or a client portal login. The messaging, branding, look and feel are all influenced by marketing.

Why create a marketing plan?

A plan gives you the opportunity to really understand:

* Who you want to target, why and how you will reach them?

* It prompts you to assess your competitors, what activity are they doing, could you be doing something similar?

* And to dive into your product or service – put your customer hat on, why would you purchase your product or use your service, are the benefits clear?

All of these questions need to be thoroughly thought through to carry out effective business marketing.

Putting this into a plan, allows you to focus your resource (time as well as capital) alongside specific, measurable timeframes and goals. This plan will help you with the day to day running of your business; sensible and realistic resources allocated ahead of time, will help you manage performance of your marketing efforts. This will keep your team motivated and allow you to test, refine and edit activity to produce the best results.

The marketing plan is your roadmap, it provides you with clear direction making it straight forward to align execution and reporting to your objectives.

You don’t have to do it alone…

Planning your marketing for 6 months, 1 year or even 2 years in advance can seem daunting but you don’t have to undertake this task alone. In fact, having an outside perspective involved with your planning, asking different questions, challenging your thinking – can produce even better results.

And don’t forget this is not a one-off exercise that is completed and stored to never be looked at again. This is a living plan, to be referred to, updated and amended regularly – make it your friend not your foe. Find out more about marketing planning with Roots to Market here.

Tag: strategy