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Key Results of the
"Marketing Challenges" Survey.
By Stuart Ayling
My thanks go out to the business people around Australia and New Zealand who responded to my
survey during October and November 2002. In some ways the results are quite surprising.
But before I get into that I must announce the winner of the survey prize draw - Mr Simon Young of Simon Young Ltd in New Zealand
www.simonyoung.co.nz. Simon, his wife Marie (marketing chief) and I have made a start with their prize of free consultations, and already we have made some important progress.
Key survey headlines:
 76% of respondents are selling services.
74% have the primary objective of attracting new customers.
34% have no marketing plan at all.
54% stated they are following a rough plan for their marketing.
"Low awareness" topped the rankings as the major marketing problem, with 88% of respondents nominating this as a problem.
"Not doing enough marketing" due to time and/or finance constraints was the second most important problem.
[See graphs of results]
What does this mean?
I'll be writing more about these results in a future issue of NousNEWS, but at this time it is important to note that most medium and smaller businesses are extremely concerned about getting their name into the market. They believe if only they could promote to more potential customers they would be able to increase sales.
When this problem is combined with the daily demands of running the business it is often the case that marketing "misses the boat" and is left off the priority list. This may be a contributing factor to the second most important problem, the fact that business owners are not doing enough marketing.
However, with the majority of businesses selling services rather than products, it can be even more difficult to do more marketing. Firstly this is because promoting a service-based business is not simply a matter of placing more advertising or distributing more business cards. Then there is the issue of "not knowing which marketing activities work", which was the third most important problem mentioned in the survey.
With 63% of respondents claiming they are following a marketing plan (either a rough or detailed) it is surprising that low awareness in the market is such a highly rated problem. Maybe this is because many businesses do not have a clear understanding of which marketing activities are best suited to their situation, or are not measuring the results of their marketing efforts.
It may also be that businesses do not have a clear focus on who their customers are. In some cases this will lead to promotional activities targeting too wide an audience, requiring a larger budget and more time, which then creates the feeling that not enough marketing is being done.
I believe in most cases our goal should be to be well recognised amongst our target audience, not necessarily to be known by "everyone". Because whilst being known to everyone may impress your family and friends, it can be very costly and often means that somewhere you are neglecting communication with real prospects.
Low price is the least important problem.
Interestingly, "low price, low margins" was the least most important problem. Once again this may be influenced by the predominance of service businesses, where price is not the main issue for customers. In most cases customers are more concerned about the trustworthiness and integrity of a service provider rather than the price.
In summary, these results tell me that business owners see themselves as having a great need for ways to communicate more effectively with their potential customers, and they don't believe their current marketing activities are doing an adequate job. If you have any comments or opinions on the survey results please let me know.
Finally I must stress that this survey is strictly qualitative, not quantitative. That means the survey has identified important issues and provided some relative measure from which we can judge the importance of certain marketing issues, but it does not claim to be statistically accurate.
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