1. Sprinkle Your Content with Magic Make sure your brand stands out by posting beautiful, festive content. Use Christmas hashtags such as #{Your Brand}Christmas. Post Christmassy reels with festive music.
2. Christmas Collab Ask other small businesses to collaborate over the festive season – pooling resources helps when you’re on a tight budget, plus you get to share audiences and increase your reach.
3. Use Delivery Deadlines to Create Urgency Make sure delivery times, cut off dates and all shipping information is prominent at every touchpoint: pop-ups and announcements to inform your visitors when they land on your website; make use of page banners; ensure the same messaging is used across all channels including social media, email marketing, website etc.
4. Last Minute Shoppers Make sure you are optimised to show up in ‘Near me’ and ‘Local’ searches – those last minute shoppers will need somewhere that can do same day collection or delivery so offering in-person pickup could be the difference between a sale or not. Update your Google Business Profile – include holiday opening and closing times and any collection information. Consider running location based paid campaigns.
5. Christmas Competitions Takes a bit of planning but it doesn’t have to be complicated. You could run a daily giveaway over the Twelve Days of Christmas, hold competitions where customers receive entries when they share, like and tag your posts or run a Christmas themed BOGOF offer.
6. Support a Local Charity There’s no better way to engage with your local community than to support a local charity. Create connections and build trust while giving back to a charity and highlighting your community spirit and boost brand awareness.

Don’t let the silly season get you down, we are always on hand for any creative remedies, marketing or website conundrums. Contact us to find out how we can help your business with creative Christmas ideas, Google My Business ailments or some content magic! Book a Free Consultation >

We have talked before about the importance of marketing including making sure you have a marketing strategy and a budget. But in the current economic climate businesses are looking to make savings wherever they can and you might be questioning the value of marketing.

​This month we thought we’d take a look at how you can measure whether your marketing is giving you a good ROI (Return On Investment) by comparing how much you are spending on marketing with the revenue created.

How to measure marketing ROI
There is a simple formula you can use to measure marketing ROI but first you need to gather certain metrics:

• Number of leads: How many people converted to a lead?
• Lead-to-customer rate: From those leads what percentage converted into customers? Eg if 10 leads out of 100 converted into customers that gives you a lead to customer rate of 10%
• What is the average price of your product?
• How much did your marketing campaign cost? Include costs of the ads including staff costs of those who worked on the campaign.

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
CLV is another useful measure of ROI – a simple formula for calculating your CLV is:
CLV = (Average value of a transaction) x (Average number of transactions) x (Customer lifespan)

CLV is a great marketing analytic because it tells you how much a customer is likely to spend with you and gives you insights that will help you plan your marketing strategies.

But ROI isn’t just about financial measurements, you can also get a good indication of ROI from other sources:

• Increased brand awareness – A big marketing push is common among startups to increase brand awareness and carve a space in the market.
• New social media followers – While increased numbers alone doesn’t necessarily mean positive ROI, if the new followers are your target audience and are engaging with your content then they are more likely to become customers.
• Email newsletter signups – Email marketing is a valuable way of reaching both new and existing customers. Use email marketing to send personalised offers, deals and new products and services. Tracking sales attributed to email subscribers can help you decide whether to invest more or less time in your email marketing.

How you can Improve your ROI

• Set Clear SMART Goals: Be specific about what you want to achieve and set a deadline (and stick to it)
• Track your metrics: Google Analytics is great for keeping you up to date with important metrics such as sales, website traffic etc.
• Analyse the right metrics: There’s no point focussing on metrics that don’t help you achieve your goal. Wanting to increase revenue? Focus on conversion rates and CLV. Looking to increase brand awareness? Direct traffic and social media mentions will give you good insights.

Is your business marketing in need of a boost? Creative Remedy can help improve your ROI with a bespoke prescription for your business. Get in touch to find out more.

What is a Customer Avatar?
If you haven’t already guessed, a customer avatar is your ideal customer - not your average customer - but the perfect customer who will want to purchase from you again and again.

Once you have discovered your customer avatar you can build a strong marketing strategy and improve your user experience.

Why you need a Customer Avatar

• Tailor your marketing - email marketing will be so much easier once you know ‘who’ you are writing to. No more generic, soulless chit chat - you will be able to adjust your tone and voice to engage with your customer and create campaigns that they can’t resist!
• Improve user experience - Whether that means a slick app for shopping at your store or choosing different social media platforms.
• Product development - Once you know what makes your Custom Avatar tick, you can develop products and services that they need.
• Write relevant content - Coming up with interesting content is always a challenge if you are blindly targeting the masses but once you’ve established your target customer you should be able to come up with plenty of insightful, helpful and engaging content.
• Paid Advertisements - Your customer avatar will help you decide where you should run paid adverts. You will also know which demographics you need to be targeting which will tell you what wording you need in order to get the best return of investment.

How to Create Your Customer Avatar

Do your research - If you are an established business then you have a great starting point as you can ask your customers for feedback:

• Set up polls
• Send out surveys or questionnaires
• Interviews
• Analyse data from third party analytics

Build Your Customer Avatar - Give your fictional customer a name and try to get a picture of them in your mind. Think about their demographics ie age, gender, income etc.

• Try to envision where they get their information - Online search? Word of mouth? Instore? Books?
• What are their goals? What are they trying to achieve?
• What are their values?
• What are their pain points?
• What challenges are they trying to overcome?
• Why do they buy from you?
• What might stop them from making a purchase?

It’s likely your business will have more than one ideal customer, depending on the services and products you offer. If this is the case you will need to repeat the steps and create an avatar for each one.

Short Term Pain for Long Term Gain!
If you are willing to put in the hard work now and create your customer avatar(s) you will have much higher success with your marketing and sales. You will be able to focus your marketing spend to the right areas, improve engagement and build a strong, loyal customer base.

Need help building your avatar? Contact Creative Remedy for more information.

​Building the right strategy now will help your business through the year. It’s particularly important to plan and allocate budgets to the right place – creating a marketing plan can help you to do this.

​The main points to consider when creating a marketing strategy are:

• SWOT – identify your business’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.

• Decide what you want to achieve – your marketing plan should be linked to your business goals, both short and long term. Have your business objectives in mind when writing your marketing plan.

• Know your customers – to gain an insight into your business and where it stands try asking your customers their opinions.
• Research the competition – find out who your competitors are, look at their strengths and weaknesses. It’s always worth knowing what your competitors offer that you don’t.
• Strategies – determine how you can best reach your target customers covering all marketing channels to achieve your plan.

• Budget – it’s important to have a budget set aside for your marketing and you need to stick to it.

There are a number of marketing channels you can cover in your strategy including:

• Email Marketing – newsletters/e-bulletins
• Website Content – Home page design, landing pages, products & services
• Blogs – Case studies and blogs
• Social Media – Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn etc
• Print Collateral – Stationery, folded leaflets, flyers
• Vehicle livery and exhibitions stands
  
  

If you’re pressed for time, a 12 month plan seems like too much to tackle, then you can try a 3 month plan. Here you would focus on short term goals and then branch out from this once you’ve completed it.

You could also consider hiring a marketing team- they will be able to advise you on the right strategy for your business and come up with creative solutions for your business marketing. Read our blog ‘Digital Marketing - Why you need a Marketing Team’ to find out more.

If you need any help or advice Creative Remedy are here to support you, so please get in touch if you have any questions.