All business owners agree that it’s critical to get customers aware of their offer, and to regularly remind and entice them to come back to buy again. And all business owners also usually agree that they struggle to know what might be the best ways to do this, when they have limited / no funds to spend on their marketing activities. 

This workshop will use the ‘theory of constraints’ model to help business owners realise that they are already far more creative than they might realise in how they can reach new customers, as well as maintain relationships with existing ones, when they appear to have no budget to be able to spend on doing this. 

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It will clarify the different ingredients of marketing (not just the advertising and promotion part), and how to make sure that they best align in any business to ensure the best chances of success in its growing sales (such as pricing, people, sales channels, branding, etc). And in addition, it will also help to show how different types of marketing may be more / less helpful, depending on the wider growth strategy and plans of a business. 

And this won’t all be theoretical – participants will start to generate ideas and options as part of the workshop that they can immediately start to apply in their business, as well as be supported to consider how to best respond to challenges in their marketing that they may have already identified and be coming to the workshop with.  

There will be simple planning templates available for people to use in capturing their ideas, and in mapping them out in a way that means that they can create most benefit in managing how they put them into practice. 

Adrian Ashton 

After an early career with one of the UK’s top100 PR and Marketing agencies, Adrian has built the profile of his own business to gain the interest of national clients, be invited to speak at international forums, and convert one-off clients into ongoing contracts that are annually renewed. 

And all without having any allocated budget to spend on promotional activities or advertising campaigns. 

He is regularly asked to lead sessions on ‘how to market a start-up for less than the cost of a book of postage stamps’ by university graduate enterprise programmes.