Lyn and Lynne ask “Is it time for a marketing company?” I’m glad they’re asking the question, and that the other fishbowlers are also giving thought to how they should build their customer bases.

But the first question that I would ask is, “What do you want a marketing company to do?” If this company is one that provides marketing services such as design, direct marketing or PR then they will need a brief from you. And to do that you need to know what you want to achieve by engaging them.  Don’t rely on them to know this. After all, it’s your business, not theirs.

I don’t want to pick an argument with fellow Expert and all-round good egg, Ray Holden, but I would take issue with the idea that the customer is always right – not every customer, not every time.

The reality is that some customers just aren’t right for you.

Mike Hunter of Better Languages wonders about whether to drop prices when a client moves to a cheaper supplier.

It’s a common enough dilemma and there’s no doubt that we’re all working in times where money is tight and few of us, or our clients, have got money to splash around without a care.  The temptation for any business is to respond to this by cutting prices but is that wise?  I’d suggest not for these reasons:

If you're looking to promote your business, these 9 golden rules will help...

Foundations First

1.    Know your target market inside out.  Understand who they are, where they are, and what motivates them.  What are the buttons you need to push to persuade them to buy from you?  Believe it or not, even the most mundane purchases are made primarily for emotional reasons, so decide how you are going to tap into your customers’ needs to feel excited, reassured, thrilled or relieved when they buy from you.

Wondering how her writing for food labels can best convey a large amount of different types of information about her products without it turning into a confusing muddle, Marcela asks “Would you put this in your shopping basket?”.

In producing a niche food product, Marcela needs to convey different types of message. Firstly there is the practical stuff, which breaks down into three categories:

Marketing messages bombard us every day in their thousands. You might have to take my word for that because you certainly won’t have counted them. You won’t even have noticed most of them because your brain, under siege, will react by screening out anything it considers to be irrelevant or uninteresting to you. It’s an issue all businesses owners face, especially new businesses like our three Fishbowl start-ups which won’t yet have had the advantage of building up brand recognition over time. But here’s a thought that could give our Fishbowlers a head start....

In marketing, we talk about cutting through the “noise” of all these messages, albeit that most of these messages are visual. And whilst vision dominates the other senses when it comes to learning and understanding, it’s not the only channel open to the creative marketer to put their message across. Appealing to other senses can have an additional impact to make your business stand out from the competition – and it’s an opportunity that’s not widely made the most of.

fishbowlhq says: As an inafishbowl.com Expert, Francine Pickering joined the Expert Panel at the inafishbowl.com Business Clinic Live. Here, she describes how she feels the Fishbowl Businesses are progressing, and how she feels inafishbowl.com Business Clinic Live will help them to move forward.

Monitoring the effectiveness of your marketing is an essential part of your marketing strategy but one which is often neglected in both new and established businesses. The consequence of not putting proper monitoring and evaluation processes in place is that, as Owain and Dominic are finding, it’s hard to tell what is working well for you (or, in less happy circumstances, what isn’t).

They are right to identify that it’s time to be more rigorous in their marketing monitoring. They ask “have we become better sales people?” (and I hope the answer is “yes”) although they might also like to ask…