Less can be more

In the current economic climate it’s quite likely that your marketing budget has been significantly reduced and that the biggest challenge you will face is trying to continue to drive sales and profitability on a much reduced budget.

So, how do you manage to keep investing in your brand so that you emerge from ‘recession’ fitter and with increased market share?

At FMS we focus on the essentials - on the activities that work - and get creative about them. We explore new ways of doing things, new ideas, and challenge current thinking.

We enjoy rising to the challenge of doing things differently, of being creative and using our skills and experience to get the best out of marketing budgets.

Some examples:

Case study 1
Our client was producing a regular monthly communication that was a fundamental part of their offering.

We recommended that they implement a careful, well thought through re-design which would not only help present the information more clearly and concisely, but also help make substantial savings on their print costs.

By reducing the pagination from 12 to 8 pages and using a combination of colour and mono pages we were able to help the client make savings of nearly 40%.

Over the financial year this equates to a total saving of over £18,000.

Case study 2
As a main part of its employee training our client was producing an A5 product ‘bible’ used as key selling tool by its sales consultants.

The design had already been optimised so that as information changed, it was relatively simple and cost effective to update the affected pages. We wanted to take things one step further. By researching how the guide was used, and determining what information was critical to the sales process, we were able to establish that:

• The pagination of each of the sections could be reduced
• Some of the detail that required regular updating wasn’t really needed (creating ‘unnecessary’ reprints)
• The quantity of updates being produced could be reduced

By implementing our recommendations, our client made savings of over 25%. Over the course of a year this will put almost £10,000 back into their marketing budget.

To find out how FMS could help your business contact Clive on 01732 526320 or clive@fms-com.com