Story telling

When you have a business or starting a new business, you can make a tremendous brand impression and image. Today's the most effective way for building a strong brand by telling stories. Stories are memorable and they stick in people's mind, specially if they attains the attentions of the people's. That making your business and brand more memorable.

Stories make you more credible. Stories are believable and Sometime they even have emotional impact. Sharing real experience of real people actually lends credibility to your business and brand

Efficient and Cost Effective Marketing Plan

In today's competent business environment, mostly firms are trying to build a marketing plan which is better than their competitors. While doing so, most of the time they forget to focus on the core idea and deviate from their origin. Most of the firms are bringing more expensive ways to market their products by celebrity endorsements, bringing models into advertisements, associating famous songs with their products etc. These ways are highly expensive and more or less resemble in ideas. By doing celebrity endorsements, general or low class audience feels little uncomfortable to associate themselves with that particular product. They feel like this product is only for a high and premium class and it is not made for them.

To cater with this problem, one should bring new innovative ideas that are efficient yet cost effective in order to target every class of your audience. This does not mean that you overlook your target market. To support my view point, I would like to discuss the marketing strategy of ZONG, a new cellular service provider in Pakistan. Zong has currently around 4 major competitors in this market. But, Zong's marketing strategy is something unique from them. Instead of bring highly exclusive models or introducing celebrities in their advertisements, they came up with an idea of a simple guy addressing an audience without taking support of any songs or jingles. I also liked their one of the strategies in which they announced the things which are not in their package and that list was basically comprised of the disadvantages which are not in their package.

So, effective marketing plan can be unique, efficient and cost effective without using traditional approaches. The high cost which is incurred for expensive marketing plans can be saved and converted into company's profits.

Inbound Marketing Vs Outbound Marketing

When Marketing managers in a meeting ask their marketing executives to come up with new ideas to boost company's sales, they normally go for trade shows, cold calling, telemarketing, email blasts and seminars etc. This is a traditional outbound marketing approach when a marketer pushes his message to audience. Now all of these outbound marketing strategies are getting less effective day by day. 

There could be following two reasons:

• An average people receives  number of calls on daily basis and he is finding more ways to block such approaches towards him by use of spam filtering, call id block etc.
  
• Secondly, in today's world of internet people are less bothered to attend trade shows or seminars, they rather prefer to educate themselves about the product over internet.

Instead of investing company's cost and efforts in outbound marketing strategies where people are trying to get rid of you, you should go for Inbound marketing strategies where you help yourself "get found" by people already in search of your product. It could be done by Search engine optimization (SEO), social media sites and blogs etc.

Small Business Companies and Financial Recession

In these days the whole world have affected by the Financial Recession. Many large companies and big organization faced lots of obstacles while conducting their business, their revenues have dropped down and profit margin is declining. To overcome this they started the “war of Survival” or “War of Competition” Many companies and organization have jumped into that war.

But the Question is arises, how small business companies can survive? They have limited resources and capital and they haven't afford to indulge their self in war. In my opinion the small business companies should adopt the blue ocean strategy, if they do so they will survive in present recession period. And that strategy help them to keep away from that war. They strengthen and increase their market size and share.

5 Reasons Why CRM is Even More Important During a Recession

5 Reasons Why CRM is Even More Important During a Recession
Use CRM to stretch your dollar during an economic slump.

In a recession, you need to work smarter, not just harder. With CRM, your business can become more strategic — and more profitable — by applying its resources more efficiently to serving and developing customers.Here are five ways in which CRM can boost your customer relationships during an economic slump:

1. Get more out of your established customers. Even when money is tight there are opportunities to sell more to some of your existing customers. The trick is to use effective techniques and offer the right merchandise at the right time.One of CRM's greatest strengths is that it collects and organizes information about your customers and lets you analyze the data for future opportunities. For example, you can use CRM data to do a needs-based segment analysis of your various classes of customers. Needs-based analysis involves taking the customers' perspective and identifying what they need but aren't buying. Using this information, you can develop a sales strategy that will let you offer products in an appealing way even in economically difficult times. Often this involves packaging new goods and services with products your customers are already buying and offering them at an attractive price or with other incentives.In the same way, CRM can help you identify the most productive items to sell to your customers. These aren't necessarily the highest-margin items — not if those high-margin items have long sell cycles and require a lot of sales effort.One additional useful metric that is easily derived from CRM data is the profit produced per hour of sales effort for each class of items. Armed with this information, you can craft sales programs which emphasize the products which have the most effect on your bottom line.

2. Identify and concentrate on your best customers. While every customer is important when business is slow, some are worth more than others. By allocating your sales efforts accordingly, you can produce more revenue per sales hour and higher average sales.CRM systems contain tools for analyzing your customer base so you can categorize your customers. Sometimes the analysis will turn up surprising, even counterintuitive, results. The customer who gives you an order on every sales call may not be worth as much as the customer who orders infrequently but buys larger quantities of high-value merchandise, for example.You can also use CRM analytical tools to slice and dice your customer base beyond simply ranking by revenue. For example, you can look at the return per sales hour for each customer. Or you can see which lines are most profitable and which customers are more likely to purchase them. In fact, with a good CRM system and a properly populated sales and customer database, you can find all sorts of not-so-obvious but important relationships.

3. Target your customer development efforts. Just because the economy is in a slump doesn't mean that you should stop trying to attract new customers. However, like everything else in a recession, you want to do it more efficiently. This implies paying closer attention to lead analysis. Which leads are most likely to become customers? What are they likely to purchase?Since in a recession you want to go hunting where the ducks are, you can use CRM information to determine where a lead is in the buy cycle. You may want to concentrate your efforts on the potential customers who are closest to making the buying decision to reap more immediate rewards of your sales efforts.

4. Keep your existing customers loyal. In a recession, existing customers are gold. You want to keep them happy.Customer satisfaction covers a lot of ground, but basically it involves two ideas: keep your promises to customers and also meet their demonstrated needs. CRM can help you with both of these.The most common reason for not keeping promises is forgetting they were made. If you stress to your sales force the importance of entering all agreements made with customers into your CRM system, it's easier for your organization to execute on its promises.Even minor mistakes can make a difference in an economic downturn. If you promise to contact a customer on Tuesday and don't get back to him or her until Thursday, you not only haven't met the customer's expectations, but you have subtly implied how much you value that customer. Enough incidents like that, trivial though they may seem, and the customer is likely to be receptive to a competitor even if he or she can't beat you on price.Likewise, CRM can be used to ensure you're meeting customers' needs as fully as possible. This includes efficient handling of after-sales contacts such as service calls, resolving customer concerns or offering the customer the right mix of products at the right prices.

5. Work smarter, not just harder. Finally, CRM lets your sales and customer support reps work smarter. With better information at their finger tips and best practices codified into your business policies, you can optimize service for your customers and maximize revenue.