Business Insights

Here’s a well-travelled marketing statistic: acquiring a new customer can cost up to five times more than retaining an existing one. An oldie but a goodie, as they say. But how do you retain customers? How do you build loyalty? Marketers try all sorts of things. Regular emails, surveys, loyalty schemes, discounts, birthday messages, even out-of-the-blue gifts.

Introduction Tried and tested best practice will make the best of whatever economic and political situation a business finds itself in, whether it’s the continued uncertainty around Britain’s future in the EU, the overheating and protectionist tendency of the US market, or the continuing rise of China and India.

When businesses wanted to buy software pre-internet, they would physically buy a CD-ROM, install it on everyone’s computer and pay a licensing fee. Like so many sectors, the rise of the web turned things on its head. Software as a Service (SaaS) is a way of delivering software online, paying a monthly subscription without installation costs. Since the rise of Salesforce in the late 90s, the SaaS market has exploded. Lower costs, greater access to cloud storage and increased speed have moved the market away from an enterprise-only concern to a space open to businesses of all sizes.

Two out of three business leaders who’ve signed up to our Return On Marketing Investment webinars aren’t measuring marketing ROI at all. We’re not saying this to call them out - far from it. They know ROI is important, they want to know how best to measure the results of their marketing efforts, but they weren’t sure how to make a start. Here’s how.

For as long as there have been markets, there has been a thing called “market research.” The Phoenicians - a civilisation in the Middle East, established four and a half thousand years ago - studied consumer demand for their exports, and became the trading powerhouse of the classical world. Marco Polo’s diaries talk about the trade studies he conducted for Kublai Khan. Despite this long history of success, a lot of businesses still don’t fully understand the markets they operate within, or the people they’re trying to reach. That’s why we’re going to walk you through what market research is, what good it does for a business, when’s the right time to do it, and how to do it well.