Integrated marketing could be seen in a similar light: In business, your shared goal is to help sell your product/ service to a specific audience. You have the option to use a number of sales channels to do this. Think of each individual sales channel as a member of your integrated marketing ‘team’. In my experience the most successful brands make use of as many relevant communication channels as possible.

So, why am I telling you this? The reason is that as a marketing consultant, I often see organisations only making use of a small number of communication channels to get themselves in front of their target audience. In a team scenario, the more people you have with different skills, the stronger and more successful your team will be. In the same way, the more relevant marketing channels you use, the faster you will get your brand name in front of more of your buyers.

Here are a few examples of communication/ sales channels you can use as part of your integrated marketing strategy:

• E-shots/ e-zines
• Direct mail
• Search engine optimisation
• Cost per click advertising
• Social media
• Press releases/ news stories
• Advertising in local newspapers/ trade magazines/ radio
• Cross selling
• Point of sale promotions
• Sales agents
• 3^rd party distributors
• Referrals
• Cold calling

How many of these are you using in your regular marketing. How many are you not using? Some channels may not necessarily be suitable for your business but others that you haven’t considered in the past may be extremely lucrative.

The key to successful marketing is to constantly review what is working and what isn’t as part of your integrated strategy. The more relevant channels you use, the higher your success rate is likely to be!

Written by Jag Panesar. Jag specialises in working with organisations throughout the UK and Ireland to help them expand through sustainable and profitable growth.

Here are a few tips on branding that my clients have found helpful in the past:

1) Always keep your branding consistent across all marketing materials i.e. colours, logo, message, format etc

2) Keep it simple. The simpler your branding and your message is, the easier it will be to remember. Think of the Nike logo (a simple flat coloured tick) and their ‘Just Do It’ strap line( 3 simple words relating to activities associated with their products).

3) Brief staff on your brand ethics/ code/ identity so they can all represent your business in the correct way. Your staff are ambassadors for your brand.

4) Keep an eye on who is talking about your brand and what they’re saying through online tools such as Google Alerts and regular monitoring of press releases and social media

5) Ask your graphic designer for a set of brand guidelines. This will help you understand what fonts/ colours/ components your logo is made up of and other colours that will compliment it.

Here are 5 customer retention tips that many of my clients have found useful in ensuring repeat business.

1)     Communicate with your customers regularly. There are many ways you can keep your brand in front of customers including email, mail shots, courtesy calling and texting.

2)     Give your customers useful information in and around your area of expertise on a regular basis. Doing this will:

1. help build trust and build an intrinsic value for your product/ service/ brand
2. show your customer base that you are an expert in your field of business
3. keep your brand at the forefront of your customer’s minds

3)     Reward customers for loyalty. This can be done in a number of ways. Examples include loyalty discounts e.g. ‘get £5 off your 4^th hair cut’ and additional free services. The Orange mobile phone network gives you a ‘magic number’ every 6 months. This is a phone number of your choice that is free to call at any time of day for any length of time.

4)     Get regular feedback from customers on your product/ service. This works well for two reasons:

1. It helps you improve your service to help gain and retain more customers
2. It shows the customer that you care

5)     Keep all your customer information on a database. With this you will be able to build a profile of different customers’ buying patterns and habits. This will equip you with vital market intelligence to help:

1. retain customers for even longer periods of time
2. identify opportunities where you can up sell to them

These 5 tips reference the most common stumbling blocks I witness businesses coming across when it comes to marketing planning/ strategy

1)     Always have a written marketing plan. No matter how simple it is, make sure it is in written hard copy format. Research shows that long term written plans are much more likely to come to fruition than verbal/ non written plans.

2)     Be creative in the way you present your plan, even if it is only for your eyes. The idea behind a marketing plan is that you refer back to it on a regular basis as a road map for where you want your business to go. There is nothing more difficult to read than a detailed document filled with solid text from beginning to end. Use tables, charts, bullet points and colour coding for different sections to break up the plan and make it easier on the eye.

3)     As mentioned above, a marketing plan should be referred to and reviewed regularly. This helps you refresh your focus and update any relevant information as and when it is needed. Fix specific review points in your diary so you can check, analyse and reflect on your progress. Depending on the nature and size of your business, monthly or quarterly updates are advisable.

4)     Be realistic. An unrealistic plan with unrealistic figures is a waste of time.

5)     Once you have created your plan, take action on it as soon as possible. Procrastination is a very common reason for a lack of sales/ business growth.

Tom Pellereau: A £250k investment despite a flawed business plan??

Anyway, less about my disappointments and more about what we can learn from what we’ve seen. I pointed out in past blogs that the contestants made the same mistakes over and over again. Even the final episode showed them to be guilty of this crime to business. The common mistake they all seemed to make in the final was a lack of market research.

How can you expect to gain a £250,000 investment with little or no market research? In a real life situation where the investor wasn’t obliged to invest by a viewing public, I get the feeling there’s a chance that none of them would have been successful. Even if the £250,000 investment (which is pocket change to Lord Sugar) fails, he’s still the overall winner due to the airing of a 7th series of one of the years most popular TV shows!

The fact that the finalists didn’t build solid market research into their business plans probably explains why there was such little emphasis on it in all the tasks (amongst several other crucial business survival laws)

Did the right person win?

In hindsight, if you have to choose a winner, Tom is the right person to compliment Lord Sugar’s business skills (which leaves me with egg on my face after my week 4 prediction of Tom to be a definite contestant to get the boot!). Many people were convinced that Helen would win (myself included), but I now realise that we were thinking of her winning in respect to the old format where Lord Sugar hires an actual apprentice – a small cog in a large machine. In this programme’s format Lord Sugar was looking for a business partner (a large cog in a small machine), which is where Helen wasn’t able to compete with Tom, despite her record breaking number of wins.

It will be interesting to see if Tom’s ‘back fixing chair’ will actually make it into our offices or if Lord Sugar had other plans for Tom’s inventive mind….

This doesn’t mean you should lose focus on winning new business. There needs to be a well planned ratio in your customer acquisition vs customer retention strategy.

One factor that plays an important role in both strategies is data capture. No, this doesn’t mean you have to go out and imprison the pale robot guy from Star Trek (apologies to all non Trekkies out there – it’s a (poor) joke that only us nerdy Star Trek fans will get), it means that you need to capture as much customer information as you can.

Data: No need to look so worried, we're not talking about you

You will have a number of opportunities to do this. Whether your customer buys from you face to face, over the phone, online, by post or any other means, you have the opportunity to ask them if you can send them more information. If you don’t ask, you don’t get. Here are a few ways you can do this:

1) Set up an email newsletter sign up box on your website and divert your customers attention to it

2) Make asking them if they want to receive additional information a vital part of your post sales courtesy call

3) Use mail opportunities such as invoicing to add a request form. Make it easy for customers to reply by adding a self addressed envelope with a pre-paid stamp and a simple form that they can tick/ fill in and send back

4) Give incentives for customers to give their data e.g. offer a discount on their next purchase or something free

As long as the information you are sending is interesting, relevant and non intrusive, you’ll be building your brand, raising awareness, developing a customer relationship and increasing your chances of repeat purchases.

However, be warned;  there is a lot of red tape around this subject so make sure you’re staying in the boundaries of the Data Protection Act 1998 i.e. make sure you have the customer’s permission to send the information!

As long as you abide to the rules, data capture can play a crucial part in the growth of your business. After all, a major business rule is know your customers. When you get to know your customers you need to have somewhere to store the information. A database would be that place. This would also be the tool that you would use to segment your market.

How are you capturing your customer data and are you using it to its full potential?

Zoe Beresford: Your chances of winning were 'snapped and shared' amongst the other contestants

Why, oh why will these people never learn? I can understand that it’s easy to criticise the candidates on The Apprentice and it’s probably much harder when you’re actually there. Despite this, I can’t believe that they (a bunch of hand picked ‘professionals’ from thousands of applicants) still manage to miss some of the most basic rules in business.

Those of you who follow this blog series will have noticed that I didn’t post anything for last week’s episode – episode 8. There are 2 reasons for this:

1) I was in despair at the lack of inspiration the episode provided from a ‘marketing lesson’ perspective (that I hadn’t already covered in previous related blogs)

2) I was extremely busy giving my target audience what they want (something The Apprentice candidates seem to struggle with), i.e. I had a busy week!

Despite no blog for episode 8, you didn’t miss much. Leon Doyle was fired because he couldn’t speak French. Just kidding, he was fired because of his poor excuses and lack of proactive involvement in his task. I’ll say no more on this episode except that it’s apparent now that The Apprentice is more about entertainment than business than I originally thought (silly me, assuming the BBC would put business lessons ahead of entertainment!)

Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, the candidates always managing to forget basic business rules. So, which one did they forget this time? The winner of the ‘missed rule competition’ for week 9 is…… Zoe Beresford. Well done Zoe! The rule you managed to forget was: Don’t try to be all things to everyone.

Zoe’s team (Logic) created a ‘snap and share’ concept biscuit which was actually packaged quite well (despite a very close resemblance to Cadburys’ branding). The fatal flaw in their concept was that they hadn’t thought about their target audience. In a market as saturated as the biscuit market, without a strong identity, there is no way a new brand will survive.

The lesson here is to make sure you know exactly who you are selling to.

Was the right person fired?

Yes. With only 6 candidates left, it’s obvious that Helen or Melody are the most likely to win. The rest of the episodes until the final are simply ‘fillers’ for entertainment purposes: a means to an end for Lord Sugar to find his new business partner (which he’s probably already decided on).

On the other hand if you pace yourself and jog at a steady pace, you’ll get to where you want to go with energy to spare.

Why am I telling you obvious facts about running? Because it works as a perfect analogy for marketing. In this example consider energy as a metaphorical substitute for time and money. If you pace yourself, you’ll build a sustainable business. If you don’t, there a lot of risks that you may not have calculated which could end up costing you a lot!

I come across clients who (rightly) want results immediately on a regular basis. This isn’t a problem with some principles of marketing. However with others, you can only get good results over a period of time. Branding is a perfect example of ‘marathon marketing’. Understanding your brand perceptions cannot be rushed. You have to give consumers time to climatise to what you stand for.

If you take the time to understand how your customers perceive you, you’ll be able to tweak your product/ service to give them more of what they want rather than what they don’t want.

Consider questionnaires, surveys or focus groups to get an insight to what your customers really think. If you do this regularly and adjust your offering based on the results, you will build a loyal customer base over time.

So for all you pushy commission based sales ‘sprinters’ out there, think about the long-term relationship with your customer. If you give them what they want rather than selling them everything under the sun, they’ll be happy with what they’ve got and more than likely come back to you the next time they need to buy!

Glenn Ward: Sorry Glenn but no engineers allowed

If BBC 2’s You’re Fired is anything to go by, this isn’t a good sign for Jim Eastwood. He seems to have become the least popular contender on the show. Luckily for him though, Glenn Ward got fired last night on the grounds that Lord Sugar didn’t think he could see himself in business with an engineer (why allow him on the show in the first place then?).

Unfortunately for me, Glenn was one of my favourites as a finalist in my early prediction blog in week 4. Jim was also one of my favourites as a finalist. It looks like I was a touch off the mark!

So where did it go wrong?

The task was for the teams to create a magazine concept that they had to pitch to media buying agencies. The team with the most interest won. In this case it was Logic with their lads/ business magazine.

The losing team came up with a magazine targeted at the over 60’s demographic. Project manager Jim based this decision on the high magazine circulation figures within this demographic – a clever insight. What wasn’t so clever was their decision to work on a product to target to an audience they knew very little about. Despite researching their focus groups they still came up with a lot of stereotypical ideas for content, which wouldn’t go down too well with their buyers.

On the other hand, Logic focussed on an age demographic similar to their own – a good start. However, Project manager Natasha’s insistence on creating a ‘typical’ lads mag could have lost the task for the team. Tom’s idea of giving it a business focus gave it that essential differentiating factor that led them to victory.

Going back to team Venture’s over 60’s magazine, they decided to name it ‘Hip Replacement’ (meant as a double entendre). This was the ultimate failure of the team. It was obvious they were struggling with all the names they came up with. This should have been an indication that maybe it was a bad idea and they should have considered changing the concept?

There are 2 marketing lessons here:

1) Choose your brand name carefully: the name you choose can be the make or break of your brand. Logic’s ‘Covered’ was commended whereas Venture’s ‘Hip Replacement’ was ridiculed. There’s a thin line between clever and plain stupid!

2) Know your target audience: this one seems to be cropping up a lot in these blogs. Jim should have steered his team to sell to a demographic they knew more about. In the unrealistic short time frame in the task, the team don’t have time to fully research target markets so they should have gone with one they knew more about.

Was the right person fired?

As you’ve probably gathered from past blogs I’m not a big fan of Susan. I think she should have been the one to go. Yes she seems to have a smart business mind but I feel she’s too naïve to be working with Lord sugar just yet. Unless Jim changes his tact very quickly, I don’t think he’ll be around for long either!

Edna Agbarha: This is one high profile job that you don't need 3 Degrees for!

Finally, a win for team Logic, but only by a miniscule £6! This possibly could have been one of the most difficult tasks set in the entire series of The Apprentice. Team Venture only just lost but with it being so close, the smallest decision could have changed the fate of Edna Agbarha – the 7^th person to get fired in this series.

So where did it go wrong?

The real test on the candidates here was on their logistical skills and their ability to work in an industry that requires experience (which they didn’t have) to succeed. Unfortunately for team Venture, they got the buying and selling process mixed up as they didn’t fully understand the market – an easy mistake to make in this unrealistic task; you wouldn’t set out in business in this (or any) industry without understanding the market and its people.

The high-risk strategy adopted by team Logic only just paid off for them. They offered to clear out rubbish from a building site at no charge, which is often where companies in this industry make part of their revenue. It just goes to show that sometimes a high-risk strategy can reap the rewards. In reality, you would take a calculated risk and weigh up the positives and negatives in some depth before taking such a risky step.

Was the right person fired?

My initial thoughts were that Susan should have been fired. However, after Edna’s outburst in the boardroom about her 3 Degrees and her academic qualifications, I was convinced that she would be the one to go.

I have no problem with academic qualifications. The problem here was that Edna obviously didn’t do her homework on Lord Sugar. Had she have done her homework she would have known that Degrees and qualifications are not what make him tick, he looks for capabilities and initiative in a candidate.

The lesson to be learnt here is: Know who you are selling to and get on their level i.e. think about your target audience. In this programme, the candidates are not only selling as a part of their tasks, they are also selling their competencies to their potential new business partner, Lord Sugar. If their sales pitch consists of things that are of no interest to Lord Sugar, they may find themselves out of the competition!