How do you market a business, a product or a service successfully while keeping in line with a marketing budget?  The first thing is to work out your marketing budget.  I was fortunate to be taught early in my career about percentages.  Understanding of total revenue base and how a business can maintain a profit by working in percentages. 

I was with my friend this morning and he has a car wash business.  He will have an annual turnover of about $300,000 per year.  He has run this business for just on 3 months.  What should he spend on marketing? What marketing should he do? How does he measure the results? 

When you take into account a business and the three key costs which are generally labour, premises and marketing, usually labour will be approximately 45% of total turnover, premises 5%, and marketing should be no more than 4%.  The balance are generally sundry costs which add up to around 20%.  This gives the business a target of 25% gross to net profit.  If we quarantine marketing then he has a total spend available of $12k.  It doesn’t seem much but there again he is in the business of making people feel good about their car 

What we all know is who our customer is.  80% of his customers are known.  So immediately he has a target but if he can only spend on average 4% of his total turnover to attract a customer then where does he target it? 

The best form of marketing for his business is brand marketing through the customers that he currently is getting.  Emphasising loyalty and referral will be the best way for his business to continue to grow at a steady rate.  Remembering that the customer of his business will always want their car washed.  The question for him is “will they come back?” 

It is important to know the percentages within your business, they are standard and how you market your business or your product, linked with your service, is a key to new customers and customer retention.  In our business of real estate, generally the focus is on the product and rarely on the brand but with many businesses the focus is on the brand and then it drills through to the product.  My recent experience at looking at cars shows an emphasis on the brand which then provides the different products within that brand.  How much do you spend on marketing and is it at the 4% level?

Our newspapers every day are full of headlines about the economy, crime, the political scene and other world events and you read those articles and that is what makes up our news.

When you go to the airport and you are going through the process of boarding a plane, leaving aside the sometimes frustrating experience that surrounds the process, when you look around at airports, they are an incredible place in the fact that the real news within us could be seen at an airport.  Rarely any other place will you see the emotion of families about to be separated and how that is expressed.  Conversely in the arrivals hall the joy that people have in being reunited with friends and family.  It really is amazing that the real news of the day can be seen at an airport. 

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There has been a lot of talk about data and a data base.  How do you value the use of data and what is the return on an actual database? 

There are three levels of databases. Those that have a non-contact component which are generally subscriber based e-mail databases; the next is a part-contact database which involves being able to phone individuals; and the third is a full-contact database which are people that are known one-on-one and their history is also available to recall. 

A non-contact database is generally quite big.  It works on a percentage return of about 3%.  So if you send out 100 e-newsletters you may get an enquiry back from 3 people if they are interested in the product or service that you offer.  

The part-contact database is generally one that may be used by a telemarketer who makes contact directly to try and get an appointment with a potential prospect.  The return on appointment is generally between 6% and 8%.

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The quality of our lives is in direct proportion to the quality of the questions we ask ourselves.

Questions can have a positive or negative effect.

If we want better answers in our lives we have to be prepared to search and ask ourselves better questions.  Questions are the source of change.  What are the questions that you really need to put to yourself to discover a life change?  Questions control our focus and our focus controls our outcomes.  Whatever we are experiencing in life is not based on life itself but what we are focusing on.

If we want to change our focus, we have to change the questions that we ask ourselves.  Why me?  If you don’t know, then surely no one else will.  Better questions need to be asked.

Whatever you ask for, you will get an answer to.  If you want a great life, ask great questions.  Questions empower you.  Good questions form the catalyst to more good questions.  Questions are inspirational, questions can be new start,  questions can simply be something better.  Life is a self fulfilling prophecy and seldom do we exceed our expectations.

When you ask yourself questions, it is a starting point for new beginnings, the better the questions the more you trust yourself to finding answers.  The golden rule – you will never make a mistake by asking yourself a question.

My favourite question – Where do you draw the line between POSSIBLE and IMPOSSIBLE?

I am about to board a plane to Queenstown and although I do not think about it much I am going to be putting my life in the hands of one company, one plane, and hopefully two pilots.  The reason why I don’t think about much is because 99.99% of flights land safely in a track record that is unrivaled by any other industry.

On a daily basis worldwide there are 68,000 flights through different companies, flying different planes with different pilots and different passengers but with Read the rest of this entry »