July 21, 2016—Elite Worldwide hosted the second of four free webinars on Wednesday. This webinar focused on how to further find and define the ideal customer, and how to set a marketing budget.
After taking the first steps to identifying your ideal customer in the first webinar July 13, Elite’s Bob Cooper and Jen Monclus suggested Wednesday to study who your ideal customer is. Look at what local groups and clubs they associate themselves with. Are they part of a local country club, church, or society? Find out what issues your ideal customer is passionate about and create opportunities to market with those issues. For example, if your ideal customer volunteers at the local humane society, your shop could host a volunteer day or fundraiser for the humane society.
Setting a budget is the next step in creating a strategic marketing plan, Elite said. First, you have to figure out what you want the shop’s brand to be. Is marketing the new brand an evolution or a revolution? The marketing budget must be an investment into the shop’s brand.
The budget should be 5 percent or more of the shop’s targeted sales. For example, if a shop has $700,000 in annual sales but wants to make $1 million in annual sales, the minimum marketing budget should be set at $50,000. Elite said that 50 percent of that marketing budget should go to nontraditional marketing, and 20 percent of the budget should be targeting customers in the Y and Z generations. Elite also said that a shop must seasonally adjust the marketing budget to make it most effective.
The next Elite webinar will take place at 10 a.m. PST on July 27. More information on how to participate in the webinar can be found on Elite’s website.
Here is the full webinar:
