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.

If you want your business to thrive and grow you need to invest time and money into great marketing and an integral part of your marketing is content creation.
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Generating ideas and producing quality content can be time consuming and it can be difficult to know what and when to post. Social media presence is vital for your business to thrive but your posts need to be engaging and relevant if you want to see results.

What is Content Creation?
When we talk about content creation we are specifically discussing written or visual content (images or video) based on topics that would appeal to your target audience. This content could be in the form of a blog, email marketing, social media posts, websites and landing pages.

All content needs to be relevant and interesting - your aim is to build engagement and provide information to your followers/audience.

Social Media
Creating content for social media requires a bit of thought - each platform has its own rules, e.g. Twitter has a character limit if you have the free account and to get the most out of Instagram you need to make sure your images are at the correct size/aspect ratio.
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Websites & Landing Pages
Landing pages are a great tool to have in your digital marketing strategy - the main purpose of a landing page is to convert visitors into leads or leads into customers.

Unlike a standard website page, a landing page is a stand alone page without all the distractions of links and navigation, its sole aim is to collect contact information from your visitor in exchange for something such as an offer, ebook etc.

Content for landing pages needs to be compact, concise and have the all important call to action!

Email Marketing
Newsletters and email marketing are a great way to engage with your customers, let them know about what’s happening in your business and share personalised offers.

Why you Need a Content Creator?
If you struggle to come up with amazing content for your social media channels, blogs or email newsletters then take heart- you are not alone. Running a business is hard enough without trying to keep up with digital marketing and the need to keep feeding the beast known as the algorithm.

• Content creators are able to think objectively about your business- something it’s difficult to do if you’ve nurtured your business from scratch. They will be able to see the weak points in your marketing plan and come up with creative solutions.
• They will do the research for you - finding out what your audience is interested in to ensure the content you post is relevant to your followers.
• A dedicated social media manager can free up your precious time by handling your social media for you- from writing great content to scheduling it for the perfect time to gain maximum engagement.
• They can come up with creative ideas for amazing content.
• They can handle the technical side of adding content to your website, across different social media platforms and producing email newsletters.
• They will be able to ensure a consistent tone and voice is used in all your content- strengthening your brand and building trust with your customers.

Do you struggle to come up with exciting, interesting and relevant content?
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Contact us to find out how we can help.