For some SMEs, it’s challenging to assign the time and resources to carefully plan and execute a marketing strategy especially with a limited budget.
What’s more, some businesses struggle with measuring return on investment from their marketing efforts. Whether you manage it all internally or get external support, you may need to ask the following questions:
- What is our real business challenge?
- Have we established our customer value proposition?
- Why will our target audience be motivated?
Once these are identified and you have a solid brand strategy in place, marketing has a clearer role to play in addressing your overall business objectives.
In order to understand its effectiveness however, any marketing activity needs to be measurable so you can evaluate your ROI.
Standard measures as such as market share, sales or brand awareness can help assess effectiveness. Additional metrics such as acquisition, retention or customer lifetime value can be added to these standard measures.
When we were asked to help Macey Insurance Brokers with their brand, marketing and communication strategy, we needed to ensure that any plan was approached in the correct sequence.
For many businesses, choosing the right insurance can be confusing and time consuming. An increasingly more competitive market with direct and online sales has become more of a threat for even the well-established general insurance brokers.
Once we agreed on the brand strategy and clarified the customer value proposition, our marketing strategy was to help educate business customers about the value of the insurance broker compared to direct or online insurers.
In order to create more persuasive communication to prospects, a series of testimonial films with real business owners were created to deliver the value proposition. The films were seeded online via social media, websites and used in community and local business networking events.
When measuring the success of the activity, customer retention as well as acquisition provided tangible results along with overall sales metrics. Specific measures of testimonial visibility were recorded through analytics data from web traffic.
Compared to a relatively flat industry average between the year before, Macey significantly outperformed its competitors and exceeded their 5-year average growth rate by 300%.
Macey not only retained all business client income in that period, but the marketing activity contributed to generating 20% growth in new leads of which 55% converted into new business. Not only did it provide positive results for the activity, it provided reassurance on the value of well-planned marketing and communications.
This is what Brendan Goddard, Director of Macey Insurance Brokers had to say about how The Marketing Clan helped with their marketing ROI.
“Jamie and The Marketing Clan have now become a valuable partner to our business. They have provided insightful creative business ideas and strategies that have impacted positively to our bottom line. As an SME business, having access to such a highly skilled and professional outfit has allowed us to maximise the return on investment on our limited marketing budget.”
