On November 6th, the Ideal Marketing Company joined forces with De Montfort University to run a marketing workshop for over 40 delegates from organisations across the East Midlands at the annual Leicester Business Festival.
Ideal’s MD Jess Shailes was joined by Zakera Kali Haq and Rubab Ashiq from the School of Fashion and Textiles in the Faculty of Arts, Design and Humanities at Leicester’s De Montfort University. Together the team ran a half-day workshop on creating customer-focused marketing plans at the city’s King Richard III Centre.
Getting to know the customer to create marketing campaigns that work
Jess took delegates through the process of grouping and defining different customer groups into personas as a way of developing a marketing strategy that will actively support business goals. Delegates learned how to develop and prioritise personas and build them into a marketing plan.
Zakera, who is a senior lecturer in Design in the Creative Industries at De Montfort and Rubab who is a PhD researcher and part-time lecturer at the university provided additional advice, tools and research methods that delegates can use in their businesses to get to know customers better in order to create a unique targeted plan.
Strengthening partnerships and building on success
2019 is the second consecutive year that Jess has run a seminar at the Leicester Business Festival and she was delighted with how the event went saying: “It was great to see an even higher turnout than in 2018 with a broad spread of companies and industries represented from across the East Midlands. We aimed to make the event interactive and practical with materials that people could take away and immediately start using within their business.”
Jess was also pleased to be able to strengthen the working partnership that Ideal Marketing has developed with De Montfort University over recent months. She adds: “The festival provided the ideal opportunity to work together with personnel from De Montfort. There is much that the worlds of commerce and academia can learn from each other in terms of business strategy and working in synergy offers a powerful tool for growth and improvement. I was delighted to be able to work with Zakera and Rubab who brought a valuable new dimension to the event.”
A fresh approach to marketing
Exploring how to create detailed customer personas in order to identify the needs of the target audience enabled attendees to think about their marketing activities in a new way. Feedback from the day included:
“Having dedicated time and expert guidance on how to create a customer avatar was really helpful and got me thinking about the mindset of my client in a way that I hadn’t considered before.”
Cat Hase, Imagine If
“I attended Jess’s event on customer-centric marketing and it was very thought-provoking, intelligent and well-structured. I can’t wait to get going with the perspectives I gained.”
Dr Naomi Irvine
“I loved the event Jess. I have already acted upon one idea I gained from delving deeper into one area I hadn’t thought of… a really great workshop – many thanks to you for hosting it and LBF for providing the events.”
Lawrence Laidlow – Funerals by Design
Find out how personas can help your business grow
To learn more about how you can find out what marketing strategies will work best for you with The Ideal Marketing Company’s free marketing consultation please call 01858 374 170.
Louise is an experienced and versatile copywriter whose passion is bringing any subject to life through the written word. She thrives on using her imaginative approach to identify and implement exciting PR opportunities for clients. A career spent coming up with creative content for tight deadlines in consumer magazine journalism and PR means Louise doesn’t know the meaning of the term ‘writer’s block!’
