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.

1. Give Away Branded Treats
Give away branded treats with every purchase or order. Cupcakes and treat bags are always popular but think a little outside the box… it might just grab you a bit of attention!

2. Hold a Halloween Event
Be part of the Halloween spirit and if appropriate make it a dress up day at work.

3. Halloween Themed Graphics
Create spooky or Halloween themed graphics and add a funky graphic to your branding... this can used on your social media and website.

4. Get Creative with #Hashtags or Voucher Codes!
You can brainstorm a bespoke hashtag or voucher code for your customers to use to promote how they use your products or services or to save money on products and services just for that day. #Halloween2021, #Boo, #FindTheSpider, #TrickOrTreat

5. Hold a Halloween Competition
Hold a Halloween competition with public voting on a specific theme e.g. For a veterinary practice… best spooky dog costume. You will need to advertise this through your website or social media.

Treat by the way!... Happy Halloween!

Hopefully you’ve already got email marketing set up as part of your marketing strategy for your business- if not then we recommend you read ‘Email Marketing For Small Businesses’ to find out why having one is an essential part of your marketing plan.

If you already use email marketing as part of your marketing strategy then great, but it’s important to update your email marketing strategy regularly in order to get the best results for your business. It’s no good just planning then leaving it for a few years. Over time your business changes and so do your customers. If your products or services have changed in order to meet demand, then your customers or your customers’ needs will most definitely have changed too.

Update Your Customer List
It’s so important to make sure you have an up-to-date customer list. If you’re using old contacts the chances are there are several incorrect details as well as subscribers who are no longer interested in your products or services. You need to be tough and cull any contacts that are no longer interested. Finding out who to keep and who to delete might seem like a bit of a task but it’s vital not only for your engagement but also to keep on the right side of the law with GDPR.

Email marketing services such as Mailchimp and Campaign Monitor will help you weed out the old customers and see which customers might just need a bit of a push to re-engage with your business.

Organise Your List
Once you’ve decided who to keep and who to throw out it’s a good idea to organise your customer list, whether that’s by the service they are interested in or behaviour such as previous purchases. Once you’ve got your groups sorted it makes it easier to tailor personalised email campaigns and hopefully increase engagement.

Make Privacy a Priority
You want to build trust with your customers and one way of ensuring that is by letting the customer know that their privacy is paramount to you. Keep on top of all legislation regarding privacy and make sure your customers are aware of the things you are doing to keep their data safe and secure - this can be detailed in your privacy policy. Finally, ensure it is easy for the customer to unsubscribe- make it clear and simple.

Make your Customer Feel Valued
Personalised email marketing is bound to have a much more positive effect on your customer engagement than the scatter-gun effect of just random content that might not resonate with all your subscribers. If you sell a product, you could consider sending out personalised birthday emails with discounts or for services- let them know how you are there to help and support them. You could also look at what's happening in the world currently- many businesses offer discounts to NHS staff or Key Workers in thanks for their continued hard work.
 
Book a health check if you need any support reviving your Email Marketing or Marketing Strategy.