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Scottish Widows - Productive marketing pays dividends
There are two main challenges for marketing: how to find the time to organise it and how to maximise its productivity.
The case study summarises how to invest a day to overcome these challenges and achieve commitment to the plan. The benefit of spending a day is that it gets the key people involved and each marketing exercise runs smoothly because everyone knows in advance what is going to happen and what they have to do.
Sally Frank has a business philosophy that she drums into all her staff: "Fail to plan and you plan to fail".
The repetition of this often annoys her team, but they know she is right. So when it is time for Sally's business to undertake the annual marketing workshop they know it will be a day of detail, but that it will save time and money over the coming months.
Sally's approach is relatively straight forward because she knows exactly what she wants to achieve: a clear one year marketing plan. She gathers her advisers and key support staff together because she wants to make sure that the responsibility for marketing is shared across the business. She knows that if one person has to do the job they will fail; lack of time will always beat them.
Sally splits her planning day into four parts:
- review last year
- idea generation and filtering
- planning the individual marketing exercises
- finalising the overall plan and "common sense" testing it
Review of last year
The first hour is spent reviewing all the marketing activity from the previous year. The typical questions are: "what went well?", "what went badly?" and "what are our learning points to factor into this year's plan?"
Idea Generation and Filtering
This fills the second hour and, to make it fun, Sally awards prizes for the best and worst ideas. She makes sure everyone is involved and uses different brain-storming techniques to help this. The first part of this section is about generating as many ideas as possible; the second part evaluates the ideas, using a Checklist (which follows) for testing marketing activities.
Planning the individual marketing exercises
For the individual exercises (or campaigns) Sally splits the team into groups of 1 or 2 to work these up. She uses a simple template (see below) to make sure all angles are covered and to help everyone else understand what the campaign is about. She insists on clear objectives to make sure she can measure the outcome.
Finalising the overall plan
Finally, the team take all the individual campaigns and log them onto the 12 month calendar. They work on the basis that the first quarter is confirmed, the second is in initial implementation and the final half of the year is provisional. At each quarterly review they roll the plan forward, so the provisional quarters gradually move forward and are confirmed.
The "common sense test" allows them to sort out any bunching of activities and workloads and make sure the whole plan is manageable and viable. Sally calls this the "common sense test": her question is "does this stack up, does it look sensible, can we do it?"
There is some re-working after the session to tidy up the plan but they then press on with the first quarter.
Sally admits that there are many other things she and her team could do with the day, but reckons it is time well spent to have her marketing organised a year in advance.
In summary, marketing for advice firms is about acquiring and retaining enough of the right type of clients to achieve the long term expansion, profit and value targets of the business.
The chart that follows shows which marketing techniques are best suited for the three tasks of raising profile, acquiring clients and retaining them.
Read full article by David Shelton, Author of "The Business of Advice"
For more information go to www.businessofadvice.co.uk "
Article last updated: Sep 1, 2010
Derek Bradley, CEO
Sarah Paul, Marketing Director
James Bradley, Head of e-Relationships
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