COMMENT AND OPINION | Paul Crow
PAUL CROW OPINION
The MD of Ripples explains the importance of creating a marketing plan that works for your business and offers some insight into his progress in perfecting his company’s own mix of marketing mediums
What’s right for you? A
Our marketing over many years served us well through the
pandemic as our digital and mental footprint was reasonably substantial
Everyone is an expert on marketing it would seem. I’m not. I did though recruit an in-house marketing specialist during the pandemic and one who had the primary responsibility of knowing our customer, their behaviour and how to reach them with our core messages. They therefore need to know what our core messages are and that entailed going back to the drawing board. When you form a family business that has been trading for over 30 years, there tends not to be too many changes within the management team and in our case there have been none. Asking familiar people familiar questions generates familiar answers and we have tried all of them. We therefore employed one of those agencies who said they were an expert on what they were doing. They sat in front of us with a blank sheet of paper and scribbled note after note as we explained what we did, how we worked, who we thought our customer was and why they bought from us. We have great products, create great designs and offer great service – how hard can it be? When we produce our adverts they must pass the thumb test. You need to be able to cover the logo with your thumb and know it is a Ripples advert. Otherwise, it could be any other retailer with a high-quality image and a phone number at
the bottom and there are plenty of them around. Our marketing over many years served us well through the pandemic as our digital and mental footprint was reasonably substantial. We had good traction with a growing audience and were ready for them when they picked up their tablets and phones from home. The adverts that they will now see contain Ripples customer bathrooms captioned with ‘There’s a lot that goes into your bathroom before you do’. We want the customer to understand that whilst they think they know about bathroom design, they probably don’t appreciate how important our designers are to the process. We explain that in the advert in good old fashioned plain English. If they care about that, we are the right partner for them and if they don’t, well they will simply turn the page or swipe the screen.
Marketing metrics
How we reach them with this message and make every pound work for us is much less simple and honestly, I don’t know if we have yet to find the perfect formula or ever will. The gold rush to social media is all well and good but it’s not everything. It’s a critical part of the strategy but only if backed up in so many different ways. Too much content can annoy, not enough means you are lost and it takes an enormous amount of patience and trust in what you are doing. Being image led is also important, but we want them to phone us, book appointments with us or visit us and getting responses takes time, consistency and of course investment. Ask me how we measure the success of our marketing and I will answer I don’t know. There is an old and often used saying that we know 50% of our budget is working, we just don’t know which 50%. And that’s coming from someone who has a penchant for KPI’s! What I can tell you is that we are getting a high number of website visitors, our customer budgets are double figures, click through rates on our digital channels are good, our design team are very busy and that all marketing metrics are growing in the right direction. We’ve spent over 30 years trying to deliver the message of professionalism in how we deliver our specialist bathroom services and that’s evolved from Yellow Pages adverts to sometimes 20 bits of content going out in a single day. We still don’t do enough and beat ourselves up over every opportunity lost and our marketing manager will tell you it’s a pretty thankless task at times Finally, I asked her recently what the most common question she is asked by our franchisees in our new monthly marketing workshops? It was: “What’s the single most important thing I can do with my marketing budget?”. I’ll have to leave it with you to figure out her answer to that million pound question.
18 · July 2021
large proportion of the people looking to connect with me on LinkedIn do so because they want me to spend money on their marketing knowledge. Their promises to do it better than the people we already use are as bold and confident as their profile photo and tag line. I reject 99% of them.
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