How to design your core message

How you design your core message is probably one of the most critical and primary steps in marketing.  It sets the foundation for creating clear, focused and specific marketing messages.  The key message produces valuable strategies for many other marketing applications like your emails, brochures, your “elevator” pitch, sales letters and more.

Developing your core message takes you closer to market control, as your message grabs the attention of your target audience and affirms your branding and product positioning.

Conceive it with insight  
Whilst creating your core message, concentrate on your customers’ problems and come up with practical solutions for them.

The reply to the next questions will unquestionably help you to do so.

Who is your market?  You must understand your core audience, and the factors that stimulate them.

Why do they want your services?  Recognise what their problems actually are, and how you may really help them.

Think about the following points to make your key message more effective.

Keyword analysis - Meticulously evaluate the keyword phrases that you want in your key message to impart your brand and value.  And, make a list of words that you ought to keep away from.

Remember your sales cycle: Your key message must be suited to every part  of your sales cycle.

Message testing:  Assess it to guarantee that it works in all situations.

Train your teams:  Everyone in your team who will use this message must be taught why you’re using it and its consequence.

After you have created your core message, it’s time to use it for all your marketing communications such as your website, professional biographies, introduction letters to potential referral sources, networking introductions, radio and print advertisements and even in media releases or while talking to the media.  

At Business Advisory Accounting & Tax Services our core message is “helping you succeed” because that’s what we firmly believe in.  Our process are designed to do that.  Or staff are taught to achieve that.  And our philosphy as soon as we walk into our office is that.

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Five ways to test your customer service levels

Your customer service level is a significant measure of how well (or how poorly) you assist your clients. 

Hence, it is a vital factor of how well your firm will do – especially how good you are at keeping clients and generating ongoing business.  Indirectly, it also adds to your referral business – how well you assist current customers will sway their inclination to recommend you to their friends, family and associates.

The following are five strategies by which you can analyse your customer service level.  This list is not exhaustive, but this ought to give you a good picture of how good you are at serving your customers.

Can you quickly fulfil orders through your stock?
If you display great customer service level, then you should easily be able to satisfy your customer orders. You should keep meticulous note of what your customers request and whether you have the item they are requesting at the time they place the order. If you are nearly always “out of stock,” then you are not serving your customers in the best way possible.

In a business with a diverse number of products, if you are able to complete the order for about 95% of the time then you are doing fine.  If you are a business that offers only one product, 100% fulfilment of normal orders (barring unusually big orders) should be your aim.

Can you deliver your customers’ orders in time?
Another factor that you must assess to test your customer service level is the efficiency of your service or how promptly you are able to deliver the product or service which has been placed. If you are nearly always missing your target delivery dates, then your customer service delivery chain needs major work.

You ought to calculate the amount of customer orders that have been delivered on time to the overall number of customer orders. This estimate should be time-bound. For instance, for a month’s total number of orders, what proportion has been delivered on time? If you register that 95% of the time, your customers receive their order at the designated delivery time, then your company is doing fine.

Can you effectively resolve your customers concerns?
For excellent customer service, you need to respond to your customers’ inquiries and solve their concerns. A straightforward way of measuring this would be to assess the percentage of the amount of customer enquiries that have been successfully resolved to the total quantity of customer inquiries received.

Do you take action promptly to your customers’ mails/emails and phone calls?
How promptly you respond to customers is another means of assessing your customer service level. If you are able to reply to your customers inside 24 hours (less is even better) of getting their phone call, messages or email, then you are doing great.

Do you make the grade according to your customers?
Lastly, your customers themselves can inform you if you make the grade or fail when it comes to satisfying their needs. You can actually carry out a customer survey. The survey should focus on customer service problems so you can determine how well you are able to serve your customers from these customers’ point of view.

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Why it pays to look after your existing customers

Over the last 10 years, I’ve learned numerous lessons managing my own businesses and also by consulting to my customers and by far the single most significant lesson is ensuring that customers stay happy.

The logic for this is watertight. Marketing people will advise you it costs between five to seven times more to win a new client than keep an existing one.

According to some, reducing customer attrition by as little as 5% may result in more profits of between 25% and 125% When times are booming and sales are strong, it is often easier to fill gaps left by a departing client. There’s also not as much of free time to identify explanations why the former customer left or do something to stop it.

As always, it takes a major recession like this one to prompt all businesses of the significance of caring for existing relationships and keeping customers loyal.

Challenging times are already most likely forcing your customers to ease costs and seek ways they can save. Establishing a concrete, trusting connection with them can lessen the likelihood of your company being top of the list of cutbacks. Keeping up a regular, well informed dialogue helps retain customers. Find out what they want and how the service could be improved.

To avert being intrusive, it’s always politic to ask them where and how they’d like to be approached and how often.  As soon as you attention, be ready to talk openly about everything that concerns them. Given the present crisis, this may perhaps involve anything from the awkward matter of a possible reduction in price to be alternative ways of working. However it could also identify other areas of improvement unconnected to the recession, such as how well your sales and marketing people are performing or how your customer’s account could be handled differently.

Companies should think differently if they are to emerge from this recession. Large or small, we’re in this slump together, so it makes common sense to operate in partnership with customers and suppliers to guarantee survival.

At Business Advsiory Accounting & Tax Services, for instance, it’s not just our direct clients that we care about as partners but also the businesses which supply us with our hardware; software, stationery etc. We might pass on any handy information to them on managing the effects of the downturn, for example, and they to us. The benefits of this are that we empathize where they’re coming from and what they’re doing to lessen risk in a recession, and vice versa.

While all this is going on, your service delivery should be be top-class so work vigorously to maintain an outstanding customer experience with clients, new and old. Develop and perfect every part of your offering from how you work to the quality of your products or services.

By pulling out the stops to help old customers, you’ll not only retain them on board but they’ll also pass the word about and help you secure new ones. And don’t forget to reward them for their loyalty: smaller companies may not be able to stretch to the expense of a loyalty card scheme but there are numerous little gestures you may make to keep them content.

Spending a small amount of money on your current clients now will be advisable in the longer term when this recession picks up.

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