Our RAPID Benchmark has now been run on over 500 Australian SME(Small to Medium) Enterprises and the results have been astonishing to say the least. Commentary on the benchmark was featured in this month's 10th Anniversary Virgin Blue In-flight magazine. Australian businesses are only doing on average about half of the important marketing activities that they could be doing to grow their business. Some key gaps include not researching customers needs and wants, not communicating to their database, not writing a marketing plan and not measuring the return on investment from their marketing. We'll replicate this benchmark in the USA shortly to compare. In the meantime, Australian SME Business owners need to do more marketing to help their businesses flourish.

Marketing has no off switch

I've recently published my first book, "Marketing has no off switch" - in this book we introduce the five step RAPID Marketing System - Research, Analyse, Plan, Implement and Detect - that we use successfully to help our clients boom their businesses. Also in the book, we provide practical exercises for the reader to complete and review real life case studies where application of the RAPID Marketing System have resulted in significant growth. I'm also running seminars in Sydney and Melbourne to groups of small business owners to share this information with them. Small business is the backbone of our economy and the better they market themselves, the strong the economy.

Marketing Seminars for Small Business

We've just created a seminar and marketing program for small business to help business owners with creating better and more effective marketing. In tough times, we recognise that many small business owners with no experience in marketing will need support to be more effective in their marketing. The program, based on our own copyright RAPID marketing process will take small business owners through a 3 hour workshop followed by 3 months of e-mail support. It covers the whole gamut of strategic marketing from research through analysis to positioning and strategy to implementation, promotion and marketing metrics.

All without the jargon and complexity of marketing textbooks - designed with the time-poor, non marketing small business owner in mind.

The seminars start in Melbourne in early April and will extend around the country later in 2009. For enquiries visit our website www.bluefrogmarketing.com.au

Sustainability

Sustainability is becoming more and more important in marketing. The sustainability of business is tied to that of the community and the environment and long term viability requires each of these three components.

Businesses seem to be now split into three disparate groups - those that don't care and are continuing on business as usual in an unsustainable fashion, those that are trying to trick the rest of us into believing they are green and the third group of companies who are genuinely trying to the do the right thing in a sometimes confusing landscape of rules, regulations and 'expert' advice.

Recently in the media we've heard murmurs from some saying that 'oh gee' we're in financial strife now so we can't be thinking about sustainability. My opinion is that now is exactly when we should be thinking harder about sustainability because in many ways it was unsustainable business practices that got us where we are in the first place.

All marketers need to take responsibility for finding ways for their business to prosper in a sustainable fashion even in tough economic times - if we can solve this now - imagine how good we'll be at it by the time the economy starts to recover.

It is in times of scarcity that human endeavour and creativity can reach the heights. In times of abundance we're too fat and lazy to worry about it.

Blue Frog Awarded by the AMI

Over the past 8 years since we started Blue Frog we've achieved some notable successes for clients. We've also won 6 AMI awards along the way for marketing excellence. Recently, we were a Victorian finalist for Melbourne Brick Company in the 2008 awards and on Wednesday night we'll attend the national awards to see if we can pick up a national award for Bluescope Steel. All the team are proud to have a national finalist and the competition will be intense so fingers crossed.

Return on investment

The concept of return on investment has been around for a long time. Here is the simplest possible way of determining return on investment for a single marketing campaign. We've used this approach for a number of years at Blue Frog Marketing and whilst it isn't 'high science' and no where near as good as a full metrics dashboard, we find it useful in small business cases.

1. Start by collecting some baseline numbers for what you want to measure such as sales, volume, new customers.
2. Set the budget for your campaign
3. Set up front a measurement period. When you will start and stop measuring results. It is important to do this up front so you are well aware of your baseline or starting numbers and objectives before you start.
4. Run the campaign
5. Collect the new data for the measure you wanted - say new business, sales or new accounts
6. A simple return in investment measure is an ROI index which is simply money made divided by money invested. So if you were measuring sales for example you need to get this figure - let's say it was $100,000 for example.
7. Now gather direct costs of the campaign - this will be advertising, printing, mailing, etc. Let's say this cost was $10,000
8. Don't forget indirect costs such as labour - make sure you collect how many hours of your time or staff time it took to implement the campaign. So if you spent 100 hours on it and you value your time at $100 per hour then this totals another $10,000
9. Add up your indirect and direct costs which in this example is $20,000
10. Divide your sales $100,000 by your costs $20,000 and your ROI ratio is 5:1.
11. Let's say you made 50% profit on your sales - this means your final ROI ratio is 2.5:1 which means you made $2.50 profit for every $1 you invested in your campaign.

This is a very rough calculation and there are many other factors such as incremental sales to be determined - what would you have grown if you had done nothing and so forth - but for the purposes of simplicity it will help you at least determine if the campaign had an effect.

Ethics of Marketing

I'm interested in anyone's comments on ethics in marketing. This is a very broad subject which can include claims in advertising and marketing, sustainable marketing, marketing to children, predatory marketing, ethical standards and so forth.

Personally, I have strong views on ethics in marketing. A friend runs a business in team development with the tagline facta non verba - and I think many marketers would do well to follow this in their approach - translated it means deeds not words. I believe perhaps 80% of all marketing is ethical in it's approach. But there is a significant minority of marketing which certainly needs to be rethought from an ethical viewpoint.

First, let's define what I mean by ethics so there is no confusion as to the subject matter of this article - I am defining ethics as the moral choices made by an individual in relationship to others - in the broader sense of the word 'individual' this could also mean an individual company - since at some point in a company some individual has to take responsibility for the marketing which is done by that company.

Let's take green marketing for example: Most marketers and many people in the community will have heard the term 'greenwashing' by now - coined to describe companies who use green messages innapropriately to try and convince consumers they are green or greener than the competition. When I say innapropriately, you can substitute the word unethically or untruthfully if you like.

In my opinion, being green will not be a differentiating point for companies or products for very long - it will become a 'ticket to the game' so companies might be better served by just doing not talking - and get properly green before talking about it.

More on the ethics of marketing soon. Stay tuned...