Your key message is the most crucial and primary communication tool in marketing.  It provides the basis for establishing clear cut, focused and specific marketing messages. The core message produces valuable ideas for many other marketing applications like emails, brochures, elevator pitch, sales letters and more.

The development of the key message takes you closer to market domination, as your message grabs the attention of the target audience and reinforces your branding and product positioning.

Establish it with insight  
Whilst establishing your key message, it is key to concentrate on your customer’s problems and unearth realistic solutions for them. The reply to the following questions will definitely assist you with it.

Who is your market?  You ought to recognise your core audience and the factors that inspire them.

Why do they need your services?  Realise what their problems really are and how you can truly help them.

Think about the following points to make your key message more helpful.

Keyword analysis: Thoroughly evaluate the keyword phrases that you need in your core message to communicate your brand and value.  Also, make a list of words that you must stay away from.

Don’t foget the sales cycle: Your core message should be matched to every step in the sales cycle.

Message testing: Evaluate it to guarantee that it works in all situations.

Educate your teams: Your teams that will use your core message must be taught its worth.

After you have created your core message, use it for all your marketing communications such as your website, professional biographies, letters of introduction to likely referral sources, networking introductions, radio & print advertisements and even in media releases or while speaking to the media.

Your customer service level is a major step of how well (or how bad) you fulfil your clients. Consequently, it is a important aspect of how well your business will do – especially how good you are at retaining clients and generating regular business. Indirectly, it also contributes to your referral business – how well you fulfil existing customers will influence their inclination to recommend you to their friends, family and acquaintances.

The following are five ideas by which you can analyse your customer service level.  This list is not exhaustive, but this should furnish you a good hint of how good you are at serving your customers.

Can you promptly fill orders through your inventory?
If you possess great customer service level, then you ought to certainly be able to fill your customer orders. You should keep meticulous note of what your customers ask for and if you hold the article they are asking for at the time you receive the order. If you are nearly always “out of stock,” then you are not serving your customers the best way possible.

In a firm with a range of products, if you are able to fulfil the order for nearly 95% of the time then you are doing okay. If you are a business that offers only one product, 100% fulfilment of typical orders (except for abnormally large orders) should be your target.

Can you supply your customers’ orders in time?
Another aspect that you must appraise to test your customer service level is the effectiveness of your service or how quickly you can deliver the product or service which has been ordered. If you are nearly always missing your end delivery dates, then your customer service delivery chain needs major work.

You should work out the proportion of customer orders that have been delivered on time to the total quantity of customer orders. This answer must be time-bounded. For example, for a month’s entire quantity of orders, what proportion has been delivered on time? If you record that 95 per cent of the time, your customers receive their order at the designated delivery date, then your business is doing well.

Can you effectively solve your customers concerns?
For great customer service, you must respond to your customers’ enquiries and resolve their concerns. A straightforward way of testing this would be to calculate the proportion of the quantity of customer inquiries that have been successfully resolved to the entire quantity of customer enquiries received.

Do you reply quickly to your customers’ mails/emails and telephone calls?
How quickly you respond to customers is another means of testing your customer service level. If you are able to respond to your customers inside 24 hours (less is even better) of getting their call, mail or email, then you are doing ok.

Do you pass according to your customers?
In the end, your customers themselves may advise you if you succeed or fail when it comes to satisfying their requirements. You may actually conduct a customer survey. The survey ought to concentrate on customer service problems so you can appraise how well you are able to serve your customers from these customers’ point of view.

In the last ten years, I have learned numerous lessons managing my own businesses and also by consulting to my customers and by far the single most vital lesson is ensuring that customers stay happy. The logic for this is irrefutable.

Marketing consultants will advise you it costs between more to win a new customer than maintain an existing one. According to some, reducing customer defections by as little as 5% may result in an increased profit of between 25% and 125%.When times are flourishing and sales are buoyant, it is generally easier to fill gaps left by a departing client.

There’s also less free time to identify the reasons why the former client left or do something to prevent it. As ever, it takes a major downturn like the one that we’re in to prompt all businesses how importnat it is to care for your clients and keep them loyal and happy.

Challenging times are already perhaps forcing your customers to reduce costs and seek ways they can save.  Creating a solid, trusting association with them can decrease the probability of your company being first on the list of cost reductions.

Talking with your clients on a regular basis will help retain customers.  Find out what they need and how your service could be bettered.

To avert being pushy, it’s always polite to ask them where and how they’d like to be approached and how frequently.

As soon as you grabbed their attention, be ready to talk openly about everything that concerns them.  Given the present predicament, this may perhaps involve anything from the difficult matter of a possible reduction in price to other ways of working.

But it may well also highlight other areas of improvement not related to the recession, such as how well your sales and marketing people are performing or another way in which the customer’s account could be handled.

Companies need to think differently if they are to emerge from this recession. Large or small, we’re in this downturn together, so it makes common sense to act in partnership with customers and suppliers to guarantee survival.

At Business Advsiory Accounting & Tax Services, for example, it’s not solely our direct clients that we take into account as partners but also the businesses which supply us with our hardware; software, stationery etc. We might pass on any valuable information to them on managing the effects of the recession, for example, and they to us. The benefits of this are that we realize where they’re coming from and what they’re doing to reduce risk in a recession, and vice versa.

While all this is going on, your service delivery must be be excellent so work vigorously to keep up an outstanding customer experience with clients, new and old. Enhance and improve every aspect of your offering from how you manage to the quality of your products or services.

By pulling out the stops to serve old customers, you’ll not just keep them on board but they’ll also spread the word about and facilitate you secure new ones. And don’t overlook to reward them for their loyalty: smaller businesses may not be able to stretch to the outlay of a loyalty card system but there are several small gestures you can render to keep them happy.

Spending a small amount of money on your current clients now will be advisable in the longer term when this recession picks up.