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Maria Island
To take their product to market, I think what business’s need to do is:
they need to be organised, they need to know what their product is,
they need to know who their target market is, and really,
once they’ve got the confidence that all that is in order,
then the thing is to launch it in the market. Our plan was to really understand what the
product was, what our values were, what our brand was,
and really promote that in a clear and organised professional way
to our target market. And really we believe it is so important to
be organised when you’re marketing.
It’s so easy for business’s to have a product,
whatever product that might be, whether it’s manufacturing,
tourism, or whatever, the challenge for most of us, I think,
for small business is really to know how to market it well.
And in a lot of ways, the marketing is more important than the product
Itself. You can have the best product in the world,
but if it’s not well marketed, people don’t know about it and aren’t
buying it and the business is not really going to succeed.
As far as our target market go, it took us a little while to come to really
understand who they are, and their demographics. We have feedback forms from all of our guests
from the end of each walk. We get about 80per cent response and we really
go through that in great detail.
We follow up and we talk to our guests both during the experience,
and at the end of the experience. And really we have a very comprehensive understanding
now of where they live, of what their interests are,
their backgrounds, their ages, their careers, their social interests,
and all those sorts of things. You’ve got to understand what your about,
you’ve got to understand where you are and where you want to go.
And we find the best way to do that is to actually put it down in writing
with a detailed marketing plan. Our marketing plan for the first couple of
years, we didn’t really have a comprehensive plan,
or really a marketing plan at all. The phone would ring, advertisers would hassle
us to spend money, and often we’d react to that.
Now we have about a 30 page marketing plan. It analyses the product, our industry, our
competitors trends changes, and also assess or reviews how we’ve succeed,
or how we’ve progressed in the last 12 months. And really to see whether we should continue
on those same paths, or whether we should be heading in different
directions. We feel marketing is a bit like a whole lot
of little creeks that then become a big river.
And those little creeks for us might be, for example,
word of mouth is huge for us, journalism is another large part,
the internet, Google, ADwords, referrals, working with other operators, advertising
is a part, it’s an important part but it’s perhaps
the least cost affective part but it is still a necessary part to be in.
Developing reputations, getting awards, all of those things play a part to this little
creek analogy that then becomes a big stream.
We’ve found mentors to be incredibly helpful in our business.
I started 10 years ago with no background in tourism,
so whilst I had skills in other areas, Tourism certainly wasn’t one of the
areas that I was strong in. My own view is your always learning in life.
Nobody knows everything. There’s a lot of people out there; that
pretty well in every endeavour you go into, somebodies had a go at it before.
Some people don’t want to share but a lot of people are happy to share
their experience. Well the advice that the Maria Island walk
would perhaps offer, from our own experience, is really if possible
have a product to which is different to anyone else or significantly
different, and really to market that difference.
If possible things that are uniquely Tasmanian would be a real benefit.
And customer service is so important as well. And if you’ve got those kind of fundamentals
of being unique, having great customer service, being professional,
that gives you a big head start.
Marinova Marinova really looked to become more energy
efficient, and wanted to reduce its costs and become
more competitive in the market place.
Our competitors are mostly overseas manufacturers and so their
manufacturing techniques and their cost of production is much lower.
So we really need to look at ways we could reduce our cost of production.
So Marinova has been looking at improving its energy efficiency,
and its greenhouse and carbon footprint simply because of our ethos
towards environmental sustainability of our business.
Some of the projects we’ve been looking at in particular
have been to reduce the landfill that we had as part of our extraction.
As you may imagine, by extracting bio actives from seaweed,
there is a lot of residual seaweed mass. And so rather than sending it to landfill,
what we have done is looked at producing alternative products
including potting mix which is where we now send our seaweed mass,
and that’s resulted in saving about 50 tonne of seaweed going to landfill.
Another area that we’ve looked at is energy efficiency.
So rather than using our steam electric boiler, we have now put in a series of heat pumps.
As a result of our activities to reduce our carbon footprint,
we’ve manage to now reduce our landfill by 50 tonne per year and
we’ve also reduced our carbon dioxide emissions by 100 tonne per
annum. It’s important to remember there are many
options available in the market place to help you become more energy efficient.
There’s Government grants, both State and Federal levels at different
times. For Marinova this has been very important
because it’s meant that we’ve been able to bring forward expansions
in these areas, and to make us more efficient quicker.
The advice that I would give any company that’s trying to reduce its
energy costs, is take the time to do the homework, look at the system
as a whole, see what things can be done quickly, and see what things need to have more planning.
It’s nice to see that there are some small things that people can do to
make a large difference, without having to do the big capital
expenditure.