Marketing Management and Automation

How Important is Marketing to a Small Business?

Marketing, in ANY business, consists of the activities which bring prospects to you - Prepared to do business with your company.  

Small businesses just don’t have as many resources as big businesses.  So it is vitally important for them to be sure that what they do spend brings interested prospects to them.

If your company:
• Put an ad in the local circular
• Send a post card to a prospect
• Print a handout to give to a prospect
• Make calls to people you think need what you sell
• Have a website and/or use any social networking sites

Then your company engages in marketing.  Shown below are marketing actions managed by the program.

The BIG Problem about Marketing
Is finding out what brings you business, and what doesn’t.  More money is wasted on ads and actions which bring no business, than any other activity for the average company.  BestFit Business Manager (BBM) can show the results of your every marketing action, PRECISELY.  You will know exactly which activities brought prospects to the company and which had the largest sum of orders. It allows you to track every order back to the marketing action that initially generated the interest. In short, it helps you manage your marketing by accurately showing you the specific actions and activities that resulted in sales revenue. It shows you which activities you should expand and which should be modified or ended.

What an enormous saving your company can realize, just by eliminating ads and actions which do nothing to bring you business!  And the benefits don’t stop there.  By using the program, you can fine-tune your promotional efforts to be more effective, measuring percentage improvements for each change.  

Manage Marketing Campaigns
Marketing campaigns are nothing more than the group of actions you take to increase orders for a particular part of your business. 
A grouping, if you will, to assess effectiveness.  Shown below is a listing for one such campaign.

This campaign has six actions underway.  Each one has an initial budget, and expenses can be tracked against that budget.  Some of the actions have tracking codes to insure the leads are associated with the appropriate action.  At any time, reports can be run against the campaign to show others the results (You can obviously see the results here).  The person in charge of marketing would see this screen.  Campaign history, documents, costs, notes, and pending items are all attached to the campaign for instant access.

Additional Analysis
There are many standard reports already in the system to help you understand how your marketing actions are affecting your business.  But, if you prefer to create your own reports, the imbedded Crystal Reports Writer can help you format your data just the way you like. Or, if neither of these options in BBM meets your informational needs, you can run your own Pivot Table analysis on any criterion that may interest you. This makes it easy to test various “what if” conditions to help you work through different scenarios or changes that you may want to consider.

Marketing Surveys
We have included an easy-to-use survey system that helps you quickly create marketing surveys to reveal the mind of your purchasers, or test the effectiveness of your offerings.  You don’t need expensive add-ons or other tools to send the surveys out via email or put on your website.  The data obtained in the surveys becomes part of the marketing database; providing even more information to help you determine what works and why.

Find Out More?
• Sign up for the next Marketing demo
• Sign up for the next BestFit Business Manager demo

Didn’t Find What You Wanted?
• Let us know what you hoped to see
 

Summarizing BBM's Marketing Features:

We define Marketing as:
"Using tools to bring prospects to you pre-disposed to do business with you."

Some of the tools used to do so are: newspaper advertising, magazine advertising, TV, radio, postcard mailers, websites, trade shows, referral campaigns, partner referrals, faxes, emails, letters, list letters, and marketing campaigns.

Budget Analysis - With the tools in the BBM Marketing section, you can not only plan the expected spending for marketing actions, but with a few key-clicks record the actual amounts spent. As leads come in, a few key-clicks will associate leads with the marketing tactic that created them. This will show you precisely which tactics are effective, and the ROI for each tactic used. When BBM is linked with an accounting package, marketing expenses can be forwarded to the accounting software.

Marketing Campaigns (Automatic Processes) - For products or services that cannot be sold with a single contact (complex sales), educating the prospect is an excellent way of giving the prospect sufficient knowledge to make a purchasing decision. The more complex the product or service, the more education is required. This usually means multiple contacts with the prospect over a period of time. BBM has tools to enable you to prepare the campaign, and with a few key-clicks will start the prospect down the educational path.

Lead Generation - Using the tools described at the top, BBM helps you to begin generating leads.

Lead Tracking Through to Sales - Because prospects are rarely ready to buy when you first get in contact with them, it is important to keep them on your prospect list until they are ready.  While there might be many contacts with a prospect before they are ready to speak to sales, you will never accidentally lose a lead again.

Pivot Table Analysis - You no longer have to pore through data and enter it in a spreadsheet as you seek to analyze your marketing efforts.  We have embedded the ability to take any data available to the BBM database (including accounting data) and display it in a pivot table.

Marketing Surveys - Surveys are one of the most powerful ways of finding what your customers want, and one of the least-used.  BBM gives your people the ability to quickly conduct surveys using mouse-click entry, and powerful analytical tools to consolidate the information obtained.  You can also use an outbound email to gather information from your prospects / customers via the survey portal, as they respond to questions in the email.