What can SME’s learn from the super brands?

Mercedes has been revealed as the UK’s number one consumer superbrand in the 12th annual survey by the Centre for Brand Analysis, toppling last year’s winner Microsoft, which dropped into 6th place. This is the first time in five years that Microsoft or Google have not topped the list.
Mercedes-Benz has performed well  over the last five years, with the brand featuring in the top ten since 2006, finally claiming the top spot on their 125 year anniversary.  The TBCA poll, carried out by the Centre of Brand Analysis, placed the car firm ahead of luxury watchmaker Rolex, which maintained its position from last year, whilst the BBC came in third, having placed in the top five for the last five years.

So what factors are considered when crowning the UK’s top consumer brand? The survey defines a Superbrand as having established “the finest reputation in its field”. Such a brand is deemed to offer “significant emotional and/or tangible advantages over other brands, which customers want and recognise”. The survey asked 2,000 consumers to assess the following:

  • Quality – Does the brand provide quality products and services to its consumers?
  • Reliability – Can the brand be trusted to deliver consistently against its promises and maintain product and service standards at all customer touch points?
  • Distinction – Does the brand offer unique services and products to its consumers? Is it a well known brand that stands out from its competitors?

So how has Mercedes claimed the top spot? The premium brand attributes its success to investing in innovation and building on its 125-year heritage. “We haven’t chased volume sales in the downturn, but last year we increased our market share to 3.4% – a significant figure for a luxury brand. Everybody in the company is absolutely committed to delivering exceptional levels of customer service, and this survey result shows that these efforts are paying off,” says a spokesman for the brand.

Heritage proved to be a key trend in the Consumer survey, with most of the brands having had a longer life span than the average consumer, for example Rolex, British Airways and Jaguar.

So what can SMEs learn from this to help build their brands?

Well, focusing on the 3 attributes of ‘quality’, ‘reliability’ and ‘distinction’ when assessing your business, seems a sensible place to start.

Whilst cutting costs, and corners in the process, might seem appealing in this challenging economic times, it is clear that compromising on quality will severely damage your reputation and potentially long-term profitability.

Reliability and consistency are critical factors to have in place, whether you sell products or deliver services. It is vital that you maintain, if not improve, the levels of service and quality that your customers expect. The challenge for businesses is that customer expectations are not static, they keep increasing, so what might have been perceived as outstanding in the past, might be deemed expected as a minimum, in the present. Ensuring you have effective CRM and delivery systems and managing customer expectations will help maintain the excellent levels of service / quality your customers have come to expect.

Being distinct from your competitors is equally important. In an increasingly crowded marketplace, occupying a distinct and competitive position from your competitors will help your target audience understand how you differ from the other options open to them and most importantly, how they will benefit from your UNIQUE position. It may be challenging, but make sure your business has a USP. Without it, you are just another business amongst many, indistinct and indiscernible from the multitude of options out there. Having trouble coming up with your USP? Take a look at the competition. You may find it is staring you in the face.

Ensuring your business puts ‘quality’, ‘reliability’ and ‘distinction’ at the forefront of its values, gives you a chance of becoming one of the ‘Superbrands’ of the future.

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Top Marketing Tips For March

  1. Everyone’s An Expert – Another great eBook from Seth Godin. This book is for anyone who wants more. How do you get more people to visit your site? or buy your product? or donate to your charity online?
  2. Snip Snip is an easy way to share your favourite parts of videos you like. Simply snip out the uninteresting portions of the video, all you do is provide the site with the YouTube video’s URL and enter the start and end times. No sign-up required, just snip snip away.
  3. High-quality images can often be too big to upload easily. BigImg solves that problem by taking awkwardly large images and resizing them to your desired size so you can easily embed them to your website.
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Think ‘SME SR’ not CSR

Businesses are coming under increasing pressure to engage in activities which come under the corporate social responsibility (CSR) banner. CSR follows the concept that each company has a responsibility, in fact an obligation, to help the same community that allows them to earn profit.Many believe that the larger multi-national companies impact the most upon society, and therefore, must be the primary undertakers of CSR activities; however, statistics tell another story. As we know, official data gathered from across the globe, has found that more than 90% of the businesses in the world are classified as small and medium enterprises (SMEs). SMEs play a vital role and are an important part of the UK, EU and global economy; however when it comes to adopting social responsibility,  smaller companies are falling behind in making changes within their businesses to honour ethical values, people, communities and the natural environment.

Although small and mid-sized organisations may not have a multinational’s budget to help them develop their CSR activities, there are some highly productive activities that can be undertaken by smaller businesses that can make a big difference.

SME’s can reap significant benefits from a reorganised approach to CSR.

Consider our key steps to ‘SME SR’:

  • To implement a social responsibility program effectively, a company must engage employees in the planning process. Talk to your staff. What causes do they want to support? What would create meaning and motivation for them in the workplace? By getting your network of people on board, you can work together to form an effective strategy. Set your ‘SME SR’ objectives.
  • Social responsibility isn’t just about recycling your paper and turning off lights. It requires a change in attitude. Look at every aspect of your business; from your impact on the environment, your staff, your community and your business network.
  • Gather ideas internally, from amongst your team and externally, from the wider business community and internet, of activities and undertakings you can commit to that fit with your ‘SME SR objectives’.
    • You may want to reduce your impact on the environment by reducing the amount of meetings that you drive to and embracing remote-meeting technology.
    • Rather than printing documents for clients, send PDFs via email.
    • If you do have to print, make sure it is duplex.
    • Stop printing out 1000s of brochures and leaflets that never get used. If you do need tangible marketing collateral, use folders with digitally printed inserts (printed as and when needed).
    • Use low energy bulbs.
    • Don’t leave PCs and equipment on standby.
    • Incentivise car sharing or cycling to work.
    • In the winter, introduce morning and afternoon hugging sessions to stay warm and reduce heating needs (only joking…or not!)
    • Allocate days when you’ll work in the community or for a cause.
    • Adopt a cause to fundraise for.
    • Most importantly, make it fun!
  • ‘SME SR’ should be viewed as a process of building shared value within your organisiation, rather than a superficial PR exercise.  Whilst it will undoubtedly give your business something to shout about, in blogs, newsletters and social media, we believe it is a lifetime commitment that should be integrated into the day-to-day running of your business.

What is in it for me, I hear you say? Well the benefits can be significant for SMEs:

  • Improved image and reputation within your market and local community
  • Improved trust and understanding
  • Larger, more prominent profile within your community
  • Possible business opportunities
  • Increased employee motivation within your organisation
  • Increased attractiveness to potential recruits and clients
  • Considerable cost savings and increased efficiencies within your organisation

These are just a few of the ways you can benefit. Over time, you will be surprised at what doors open as a result of your consideration of your business’ impact on your community, network and environment. We may be small, but combined; SMEs have the power to make a real positive impact on our external environment. So next time someone talks about CSR, think ‘SME SR’!

 

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Top Marketing Tips For February

What Matters Now – As promised each week, the team here at TLC Business will provide you with a free Seth Godin eBook. This week we bring you ‘What Matters Now’, a great book that gives you ideas on how to get more out of your business this year.
Gallery Hosted – An image hosting and photo sharing website that provides what most people need from a photo sharing website plus a few little extras.

Corpdata – UK B2B marketing data list owner, providing up-to-date mailing list data for B2B direct mail, telesales and email marketing. To help boost your sales in these tough economic times, Corpdata are giving away 200 free contacts to every business in the UK.

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Be My Business Valentine

When we speak with businesses, the most common marketing objective they are focused on is bringing in new clients. The majority of resources are usually channelled towards the undoubtedly important activity of new business generation.
Whilst new business development is clearly a vital activity in any organisation, it is important that we don’t neglect or take for granted the businesses that you are already in a relationship with, your customers.

With Valentine’s Day on the horizon, we thought it was a great time to highlight the importance of taking the trouble to show your current customers that you care. Without them you wouldn’t be in business, so make sure they know how important they are to you.

Famously, it is 5 times more expensive to acquire a new customer, compared with retaining and satisfying an existing customer’s needs. At a time when businesses are looking to get maximum value from their marketing budgets, customer retention has to be high on your list of priorities.

It is essential to keep in touch with your clients on a regular basis. Regular communication builds and strengthens relationships, ensuring you will benefit from your customer’s business for years to come. If you are good at showing you care and delivering what they need, your customers will become advocates for your organisation, referring you to friends, colleagues and companies, generating the new business that allows your business to grow.

Taking the time to understand your customer, their business and environment in which they operate, is an essential first step in laying a solid foundation for a good client relationship.

Building and maintaining effective and rewarding relationships with clients has many benefits:

  • Customer relationship management (CRM) helps businesses gain an understanding of the behaviour of their customers and enables you to adapt your business operations to ensure that your customers receive the best possible service. (Visit our article on CRM software)
  • A close relationship with clients helps you to recognise the value of your customer base. The better a business understands its customers, the more responsive it can be to their requirements.
  • Combining your customer relationship management with your marketing can be a great strategy to maintain customer loyalty, interaction and long-term engagement. The more opportunities a client has to engage with your business the better, so make sure you open up new channels to interact with clients as they become available.

Below are our Top 5 ways to keep the lines of communication open and develop close relationships with your clients:

1. Social media is a cost-effective tool to keep your business in contact with your current clients. Use Facebook and Twitter to follow their latest events, news and articles, ‘like’ their wall posts and re tweet their twitter feeds.

2. When interacting with a client, communication is very important. Stay in touch with your clients through e-newsletters and e-shots. Send reminders about special promotions you’re running, notifications about new merchandise you’re stocking or newsletters about community events that you’re sponsoring.

3. Personal communication is key, call and meet with your clients on a monthly, if not weekly basis. Spend time learning more about their business. Find out what problems they have and how you or your network might be able to help them.

4. Run events and seminars for your clients, providing them with a great networking opportunity, as well as a chance to learn more about the services you provide.

5. Finally, send your clients direct mail campaigns to say thank you. A simple thank you card, box of chocolates or personalised gift can go a long way.

Everyone is out to win new business but make sure you don’t forget your current loved ones.

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February’s Top Marketing Tips

  1. Kindle Lending Club is a website that matches lenders and borrowers of Kindle ebooks. To participate in lending and borrowing Kindle books, you must first register as a user on the site or connect with Facebook Connect. Any Kindle book that has lending enabled can be loaned by one Kindle user to another for 14 days. At the end of the loan period the title is automatically transferred back to the book owners Kindle.
  2. Google’s online store provides you with more than 3 million eBooks. From novels to textbooks, self-help books to cookbooks, the eBook categories cover anything. The best part is that many of the available eBooks are free to download.
  3. Money for Nothing by Seth Godin, master marketer, sums up the best way to drive traffic to your website (or store, or organisation, etc.). Read next month’s top marketing tips for more eBooks by Seth Godin.

 

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January’s Top Marketing Tips

Though Box is a new service that helps you get organised in 2011. This new tool may come in handy for those of you whose New Year’s resolutions were to become more organised and efficient.
Twileshare, the time consuming process of uploading a file to Twitter has now been improved with this new online app. It is a free web service that uploads your files and lets you tweet their shortened URL at the same time. Upload and share anything from images, documents, PDFs, eBooks and more.

View Marks is a browser add-on for Mozilla Firefox, for version 3.5 onwards. The add-on adds an icon to your Firefox’s address bar. Clicking on this icon presents a thumbnail view of all your bookmarks. Instead of looking for the bookmark’s title, you can immediately click the thumbnail icon corresponding to the bookmark you wish to visit.

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Using Strategic Alliances to open new doors in 2011

Growing your business means spotting potential emerging opportunities and taking advantage of them quickly, before your competitors move in. It’s difficult to break into new markets, and a partnership can bring instant access to new customers.  If your company has the technical know-how; another company can have the resources to bring that know-how to market. This year there have been rumours of a collaboration of Skype and Facebook.  The partnership will include the integration of SMS, voice chat and Facebook Connect into Skype to make Facebook a central communications and messaging platform for its users.
The Skype-Facebook tie-up will prove attractive to businesses as much as consumers, because many SMEs already use Skype as well as Facebook and Twitter.  Even if this collaboration turns out to be just rumour, it points to a natural evolutionary step of bringing together community and communication technologies, this combination could become very attractive and useful to enterprises, as well as consumers.

Alongside Facebook and Skype, two global brands, BMW and Saab are also eyeing up a possible collaboration. After turning to BMW for help with an engine to power a possible revival of the Saab 92, it seems the Swedes at Saab could be returning the favour. Since Saab has a lot of experience with front wheel drive and BMW have confirmed that they would like to create such a model, the two companies could take the collaboration to a new level. The possible partnership between BMW and Saab could mean that their 92 model and the new BMW could share the same underpinnings.  The collaboration will revolve around the production of a tear-drop shaped car, which is inspired by the Saab 92 model, produced from 1949 until 1956. To keep the mystery and secrecy around this possible new model, Saab said in an official statement:

“We indeed are looking for alliance partners but no cooperation with has been confirmed at this time. A smaller Saab below the 9-3 is not currently in our business plan though it would be on our wish list”.

So will this collaboration be the perfect partnership or will it, like many relationships have a rough patch?

Strategic alliances, if thought about, planned and implemented properly can be the perfect tool to help a business generate new clients. However collaborations are not just for big global brands, SMEs can also benefit from collaborating with like minded companies who also want to produce a clear path for new business and future success.

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The Boom in Mobile Marketing

Last week, the team here at TLC Business predicted that social media in 2011 will no longer be considered as new. Businesses will be including social media in their marketing strategies, taking full advantage of the social networking opportunities on offer.
So what else can we expect in 2011? The team here at TLC Business predict that 2011 will see a massive boom in mobile marketing. Mobile marketing has recently exploded due to the introduction and success of the Iphone and Ipad, technology is now instant, portable and personalised.

The growth in use of Apple App store has been phenomenal; increasing by several billions of downloads in 2010. According to reports, mobiles will be more widely used then desktops in 2014, with smart phones expecting to account for over a quarter of sales in 2011. Studies have reported that mobile marketing is 10 times more effective then web banners and on average 4 to 5 times more effective then online advertising.

More and more consumers will be tuning into the world of phone apps in 2011, as innovations in the Iphone, Ipad and Android phones enable retailers to increase their engagement with customers.

“Mobiles are now another tool to add to the smart shopper’s tool belt and allow retailers to meet current and potential clients in a new sphere”

Companies are going to have to provide content that is optimised for mobile devices. This includes content such as contact information, links that promote your brand and landing pages that build your database. Not only will companies have to display smart phone friendly information, they will also have to respond to their consumer needs through the likes of mobile advertisement and text messaging.

2011 will be an exciting year for businesses. Not only can B2C companies take advantage of the success of mobile marketing, but there are also opportunities for B2B businesses to engage with new clients.  As the adoption of smart phones grow, so will the future opportunities.

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Marketing Trends 2011

In 2010, TLC Business talked about the impact of social media on your business, how lead generation can help you generate new clients and how an SME can go green. So with 2010 nearly behind us, what marketing trends can we expect for 2011?
We have produced a shortlist of what we think will be making the marketing headlines next year, the news we will be reading, blogging and tweeting about.

The age of Social Media

The past few years have seen people and businesses experiment with Social Media tools. Social Media in 2011 will no longer be considered new. In 2011, we will see businesses include Social Media in their marketing strategies, taking full advantage of the social networking opportunities on offer.

SMEs that use Facebook to market business-to-business campaigns will receive a new set of tools from the social media giant. Facebook Pages has released new analytic tools to assist small businesses in better gauging their traffic by posting impression counts. The change will allow small businesses that receive less than 10,000 “likes” to monitor the success of posted content and give SMEs an edge against competitors. Additionally, small companies will be able to see who viewed their posts and post feedback. In turn, they will be able to create better targeted Facebook advertising campaigns.

Not only will businesses be able to take advantage of the growing capabilities of Facebook, shopaholics will also benefit from the power of the Social Media tool. Facebook are capitalising on the fact that many online shoppers like to review, network and interact as they shop. Online storefronts are adding networking platforms to their virtual operations, while marketers are aiming to include social media sites in their sales strategy. With the help of Facebook, you can now take your shopping experience to the next level.

However, unlike 2010, 2011 may not all be about Facebook and Twitter. Google’s top secret foray into social media, ‘Google Me’, has been delayed until March / April 2011. The top-secret plan is rumoured to be a Google branded social platform. According to Google, it won’t be a social network the way people think of Facebook, but rather social information about who your friends are and the people you interact with.

“We are always experimenting with new ways to improve our products, and we have already confirmed that we are focused on incorporating social elements across Google, but we have nothing new to announce”

So what does Google have up their sleeve? Well, we will just have to wait until Spring 2011 to see whether Google’s latest attempt will be a triumph or failure, like Wave and Buzz. Only time will tell.

What we can say now, is that Social Media is only set to grow even bigger than before. If your business isn’t on Facebook or Twitter, it soon will be.

Keep an eye out for more 2011 marketing trends.

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