Archive for August, 2011
Mobile Marketing made easy by Mobile Riot
In my experience and research, I’ve found that viral marketing can be a positive or negative advertising method. Some companies use it correctly while others let campaigns turn negative and spiral out of control. And some people believe that viral marketing campaigns are so expensive that only big companies can implement them on larger scales. This, however, is entirely untrue as viral marketing can work for any size business. This article will define viral marketing, describe how it works, and discuss examples and strategies for small businesses.
The specific definition of viral marketing differs from person to person. However, everyone generally agrees that viral marketing is an advertising method that gets customers to market your products and services for you. More specifically, I would say that it’s an advertising method that capitalizes on humanity’s predisposition to share ideas, make new connections, and, of course, get free stuff.
When Does Viral Marketing Work Best?
Viral marketing is a touchy advertising method. Use it at the right times with the right products and your name can spread like wildfire. However, employ it incorrectly and you could see some very negative results. Viral marketing works best when a product or service is easy to use, easy to explain, has a low level of commitment, and is generally seen as “cool” in your customers’ eyes. Let’s look at these characteristics in order:
Easy to use – Because you are having your own customers do the marketing for you, it is preferable that their experience with the product is positive. If it’s difficult to use and they dislike the product, why would they refer it to a friend?
Easy to explain – Your product needs to be simple – that is, people can quickly share it without being bogged down by details. Ever wonder why those videos on file sharing websites get passed around the Internet so quickly? All you have to do is tell a friend about a great video on the Internet and give them the link. It’s simple with no explanation.
Low Level of Commitment – Finally, your product must have a low level of commitment. A friend once wanted me to sign up for one of those Internet pyramid schemes that offer a free IPOD or flat panel TV if you get 10 people to join a program. If you actually follow through with one of these things, it takes about 30 minutes to sign up because you have to give endless amounts of information, uncheck every free email box, and finally sell your soul. No one in their right mind would do this more than once.
General Coolness Factor – It’s obvious that people only want to talk about the most exciting products they use. No one walks up to a friend and describes the latest underwear they’ve bought. Instead, they describe their new cell phone, poster, CD, or book. If your product is cool, people will talk about it. And in most cases, the “coolness factor” can be changed based on how you position the product in your customers’ minds. In other words, it’s all based on the advertising that goes along with it.
Viral Marketing – The Distant Cousin of Buzz Marketing
So we’ve established that a product itself can bring about a viral result if it has the four characteristics. But viral marketing can still work for products that do not meet these criteria if you can generate an adequate buzz for them. Buzz marketing is generated from catchy advertising and works when your customers talk about your product in day-to-day conversation.
In recent years, buzz marketing has worked for companies like Volkswagen and Burger King. However, I’m saying that buzz marketing has worked for these companies – not viral marketing. Buzz marketing all too often generates hype about the ad campaigns that feature the product and not the product itself. Sometimes this can be negative and divert attention away from your product. Although some would argue that Crispin Porter’s attempt at targeting VW enthusiasts’ hearts was genuine when they came out with the “MyFast” and the “Unpimp” commercials, they do not make me want to buy a VW – an item that definitely falls outside of the four criteria.
Sure you can have catchy advertising, but make sure it’s advertising that focuses on product. Buzz marketing is more of an awareness campaign. And in my experience, small businesses need to see a return on their advertising investments – they can’t afford to just promote awareness of their products. You can’t just produce a buzz-worthy campaign that people will forget the second the advertisements come down. The goal is to get the product in peoples’ hands for the viral effect to occur.
Can Viral Marketing Work Offline? And for a Small Business?
Sure it can. I’m sure you’ve read viral marketing success stories involving Hotmail, NetZero, Skype, and even the comedian Dane Cook who used MySpace.com for his viral marketing campaign. This might get a lot of people thinking that they need large scale campaigns that utilize websites, emails, and constant updates to online material. But there’s one great example I’d like to share with you where a business employed a viral marketing campaign without much use of the internet and on a very small scale.
A local gym that I once went to had a great idea to hand out free t-shirts if members signed up for their “Guests First” program. They stopped everyone at the door, handed them a t-shirt, and told them that they could get a free guest pass every time they wore the shirt to the gym (the shirt had the gym’s logo and location on it). To sign up, the members only had to verify the information they gave when they first became a gym member. It was a win-win for customers. Everyone started wearing the t-shirts and the guest passes started flying. Whenever a guest came in, they had to give their name and email address to the front desk. Later, an email would be sent to the guest to gauge their satisfaction with the gym. It also acted as a follow-up contact to the guest. This was, by far, the most intelligent and well thought out marketing scheme I had ever seen. The gym built a database of new potential customers, generated hype about the guest passes in town, put walking advertisements out on the street, and, in the end, got more people in the gym. And it was all done on a small scale.
Would Viral Marketing Work for Your Business?
As I said before, there are times when viral marketing works and times when it doesn’t. You really need to take a close look at your products and the behavior of your customers to see if it’s right for your business.
Products – Take one of your cheap, low cost, low involvement products and start handing it out for free. If you are a service-based business, start offering free trials of your low cost services. Start advertisements about the giveaways to get more people in your place of business. Be humorous and ironic – it tends to work better with viral marketing campaigns. If the products and services get high visibility, you will see a more viral effect. Even if you only carry expensive products that get low visibility, research on the internet or spy on competitors to see what types of giveaway items have worked for other businesses. Remember, choose something that people will always see or have a use for and associate it with your brand and business.
Customer Behavior – A successful viral marketing campaign also relies on the behavior of your customers. You need customers who are outgoing, friendly, and lead an active lifestyle. The more people that surround your customer, the more impressions your viral marketing tool will have. Remember, viral marketing, or any advertising, works best when you can achieve multiple impressions with the least amount of effort. The last person you want to test viral marketing on is some recluse that sits inside eighteen hours a day and emerges only to restock the fridge and drive to work. It’s about getting your customers to do the work for you and advertising is all about visibility. It only makes sense that you need a highly visible customer base to do this type of advertising.
Go Out and Do It!
Viral marketing can work for almost any business. You know your business and customers the best. Set aside some time in the next few weeks to try and think of some great viral marketing tactics that you can employ. If you think the risk is too great, start small to test the water.
Every business has customers. Few businesses have fans. The trick is turning your customers into loyal fans. Then you will be surprised at just how easy viral marketing really is.
Marketing Tips Provided to You by: Heather Loftiss, President of Water Design Studio ([http://www.waterdesignstudio]), Author of the Customer Connection ([http://www.morerepeatsales.com])
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the paddy fields view: Advertising on this Site.
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How To Get The Most Out Of Your Backlinking Efforts
Everyone concedes that back linking to your website or blog is an essential part of SEO and gaining page rank and the resultant traffic. So understandably you put in a lot of backbreaking and basically boring work setting up back links all over. Posting comments, profile back links in forums, article marketing, rss feeds and on and on goes the list.
Then you wait for the traffic to roll in. And wait – and wait and…..
The assumption is that because there is a back link – the SERPs – and immediately we think of Google – will find it, index it
And reward us with the resultant recognition. But that’s not the case.
There is no real difference between a back link on a forum and a link on your wordpress blog. To be relevant they have to be found and although the bots are out there crawling, there are a lot of links to be indexed. So if your back link is sitting on a well traveled forum then the bots may take weeks or months even to find the link and index it. This means your back linking efforts are largely unfruitful.
This brought about the concepts of link wheels and automated back linking products which generally cost fairly high monthly premiums for their usage. But the thought behind them was that they would back link the back links and thus bring them to the attention of the SERPs much more quickly.
Back link Indexing is a great way to improve the effectiveness of your back link building efforts. Whether you use Articles, profiles, blogging, guest blogging or other back link building strategies. Taking steps to get Google to find your
links will greatly increase your link efforts value.
It’s one thing to go out and build or hire an outsourcer to build 100’s, even 1,000’s of back links to your money sites and important traffic pages. Nowadays that’s a rather trivial exercise – time or money solves the issue and there’s a
lot of quality resources.
It’s quite another issue altogether to get maximum value from those back links. Take for instance, profile back links [which are all the rage right now] – how many of those, if left alone after being created, will ever find their way into Google’s index? If Google never crawls them and indexes them, how are we to get credit for them? One case study I saw recently – illustrated a 250% increase in links indexed by Google by taking matters in your own hands vs. waiting for Google bot to get around to finding them – naturally.
So to find out how to maximaise your backlinking efforts visit http://nqoba.com/how-to-get-the-most-from-your-backlinking/
BIA/Kelsey: Social Media Advertising Topped $2 Billion In 2010
Further evidence that advertising on social networks (a.k.a. Facebook) is a booming business. BIA/Kelsey reports today that social media advertising revenues will grow from $2.1 billion in 2010 to $8.3 billion in 2015.
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Great Views of Harbour Town
Johnny Vargas Internet Marketing
If you are not getting the sales you want, effective direct marketing systems are probably not part of your marketing toolkit.
Marketing Effectiveness
Mass marketing methods used to work, but these days, traditional marketing to mass audiences is very wasteful. In his book, Permission Marketing, Seth Godin claims that, on average, we are subjected to around 3,000 marketing messages each day. The message we need to understand from this situation, as marketers, is that it is becoming far more difficult to get our message through to our market, because the clutter of marketing messages makes it almost impossible to attract attention.
With the effectiveness of mass marketing methods having deteriorated over the years to the point of relative ineffectiveness that they have now reached, the most important strategy for us in marketing has become identifying and targeting our most receptive audience. Marketing now needs to be up close and personal to be effective. It does not matter how good our message is and what media we use, if we are not directing our communication to someone who is desperately hungry for our product we stand little chance of success.
Target Market
Can you describe your ideal customer? To effectively target your customers you need to be able to describe the ideal customer in intimate detail. To more effectively communicate with your target market, you need to know the physical and geographic elements that describe your ideal customer, what makes them tick and why they like your product. Having identified our target market, we now need to find out how to communicate our message. This element has two aspects: what is our message and what media we use to deliver it.
Message
Our message to our market must achieve a five things:
1. Attract the attention of our target market by addressing a specific need
2. Present an attractive solution to satisfy the particular need
3. Present proof that our solution is the best
4. Create an urgency to seek the solution now, and
5. Motivate action to obtain the solution.
Our message need not necessarily be delivered in a single communication, although if it can be effectively done in one hit, only use one hit. However, for many products or services, a series of communications may be required to effectively deliver the message. Our direct marketing system is what we need to design to deliver our message appropriately. Our direct marketing system will comprise as many steps and methods as we need to work our way through these five stages of acceptance.
Our initial direct marketing messages must be directed towards generating leads by attracting the attention of the people in our market who have the need our product addresses. It will depend on the maturity of our market as to how much work we need to do at this point. For new products, lead generation may require considerable work to educate the market about the existence of the problem before you can present your solution. For more mature products, a need is often very apparent.
Once we have attracted attention, our aim is to get those people to identify themselves as having the particular need, so that we can turn our efforts towards lead conversion. This is achieved through the final four steps of our direct marketing system. The scepticism that exists in the world today means that you have to work hard to get your market to accept your product is the best solution to meet their need. You must be careful how you make this claim. It must be believable and acceptable.
We all tend to procrastinate and put off taking action to the last minute. You need to overcome this inertia by creatively communicating reasons to “do it now.” Using the concept of impending loss is the most effective method to achieve urgency. This can often be achieved through communicating scarcity and the risk of missing out if immediate action is not taken. This could also be achieved with the risk of a price rise leading to a perceived loss of the price difference if the purchase is left to after the price rise. However, there are many other ways to communicate urgency and it is best to be creative rather than use tired and unimaginative methods that customers may see through and regard as mere techniques to get them to buy now.
The most important element after getting this far is to motivate action to buy. Many marketing communications are weak at this point. Many ads we see promote a product and do everything else right, but leave out the call to action. Subtlety is an ineffective marketing tool. You need to tell your customers what you want them to do to buy your product.
Media
The final step in developing our direct marketing system is to determine the appropriate media to use. Many people make the mistake of thinking about media first and then developing the message. This often happens when you have an advertising sales person pressuring you to buy space in their media. This approach leads to poor or worse, zero results. When you have identified your target market and developed the appropriate messages, the decision about media is much easy to work out. Often, it will depend on how easy your target market is to reach. You need to use the most efficient means of attracting the attention of the people most ready to buy. In lead conversion processes, you may use a combination of direct mail, internet (email and web sites), or personal selling approaches, again depending upon the ease of reach.
Conclusion
One vital aspect of developing an effective direct marketing system and a huge advantage over traditional marketing approaches, is the ability to test your system before you commit enormous amounts of money to it. Mass media marketing is expensive and unaccountable. Direct marketing systems give you the ability to measure results and track your return on investment. You can trial your system in small quantities before you roll it out to a larger audience. Eventually, with the right fine tuning, your direct marketing system will deliver predictable results. You will be able to plan your expenditure and schedule your marketing program to deliver the sales volumes you need at any time. Ultimately, your direct marketing system should deliver you all the sales from the most preferable and profitable customers that you would ever want.
Implementing this success strategy and tactical superiority in your business will go a long way to helping you put your business on autopilot, where your business works so well that you don’t have to. Find out more in Greg Roworth’s special free report, The Freedom Challenge, available at http://www.businessflightpath.com. Greg Roworth is a successful entrepreneur, author and mentor who helps small and medium business owners escape business dependency and create a business that provides an abundant living, lifestyle and legacy.
SMS advertising employs the mobile telephone in many techniques that are unparalleled in the advertising industry. The ads are sent as a text message to a list of cell phone numbers who have typically signed up in …
Online Internet Marketing Services Company India | Make Money …
Online internet marketing services companies
Johnny Vargas Internet Marketing
Business to Business or B2B marketing is the selling of services and products to businesses in order to support the operations of companies. Companies use these services to increase marketing, sales, profits and efficiency. With B2B, one should know the requirements, the present situation, competitors, trends, technology and costs involved. Besides traditional offline approaches, B2B uses an integration of online tools such as email marketing, online communities, CPC (cost-per-click ads) and pop-up or banner advertisings.
1. What are the five distinct concepts associated with B2B?
As in any type of marketing, B2B includes the exchange concept of marketing, the turn of production concept, the product concept, the phenomenon of marketing myopia and the sales concept.
2. What are a few business to business marketing features?
In B2B marketing, transactions are made between and within value chains. It has a small numbers of customers who require personalized marketing, including customized products and prices. Selling processes are complex and lengthy, and involve lots of players creating a demand decision chain. B2B is also noted for developing profitable, value-oriented relationships between two companies and several individuals within them.
3. What is a B2B marketing strategy?
It is a set of programs coupled with the target market opportunities in order to achieve organizational goals. Shaping this strategy involves three steps – target market choice, setting marketing objectives and building the B2B marketing program.
4. What are some similarities and differences between B2B and B2C?
B2B and B2C marketing are totally different. B2C or Business to Consumer marketing discloses, sells or markets services or goods to a group or target consumer. It is product driven and maximizes the value of the transaction. Repetition and imagery create its brand identity.
But the marketing programs are same for these two categories. Examples are events, direct marketing, internet marketing, advertising, public relations, word of mouth and alliances. The two categories differ in behaviors such as how the programs are executed, what they say and the product of the marketing activities. Both B2B and B2C have the same initial step in developing a marketing strategy.
5. What is a B2B buyer?
A B2B buyer understands your services or products better than you do. He wants to buy them to help his business remain profitable, competitive and successful.
Business To Business Marketing provides detailed information on Business To Business Marketing, Business To Business Email Marketing, Business To Business Marketing Strategies, Business To Business Internet Marketing and more. Business To Business Marketing is affiliated with Network Marketing Opportunities.
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Have you asked a Marketing Agency to quote you for drawing up a Marketing Plan recently? If, like me, you own a small business, then it is hard to justify spending the £600 a day I was asked for here in Britain. I have to watch my bottom line like a hawk, especially in the difficult-trading-conditions we seem to be in. But here is a dilemma! A Marketing Plan is a really essential tool that will show a small business owner where their business is and map out where it needs to go. It is vital in today’s competitive environment that even small business should have one.
When you overdraft or financing facilities come up for renewal and your bank manager has to justify lending the bank’s money to your business, think how much easier it would be to convince him to continue backing you with a plan laid out in neat systematic form.
It is probably the case that far too many small companies don’t have a Marketing Plan, or the owner has it locked in his head. A place of storage that is really difficult to access when you need to show it to the potential investor or the bank manager. And inevitably this event usually occurs when you are really busy and committing your plan to paper, or computer file, is added pressure that you really could do with out. I run a small retail business – an independent bookshop and a Collectables gift business on the Internet.
Recently I studied for, and obtained, the UK’s Chartered Institute of Marketing’s “Professional Diploma in Marketing” by doing a convergent learning course on the net and in four intensive workshop days in my local town. It brought home to me that what we did in our own business was fine up to a point. As the course was very practical, with the chance to use any organisation of the student’s choice in the assignments that we had to submit, I ended up formally setting down the Marketing Plan on paper, that had been up there in my head for no one to see!
So what is a Marketing Plan for?
Well, its purpose is to lay down, direct and co-ordinate all your marketing activities and events. Think of it as a map. With a map it is easier to get some place. With a marketing plan it is easier to get the business to where you want it to head. This is, hopefully, to huge profits!
Perhaps you are the owner or director of a company seeking backing or further investment? Well a good marketing plan can be really important in attracting new investment or better bank facilities.
Perhaps you need help in making choices regarding which parts of the market to focus on and how to compete in that target market (Marketing Strategy)?
Often the mere process of preparing a marketing plan will help you to develop a successful marketing strategy through the discipline and process that you go through.
A good marketing plan will describe all the marketing actions to be carried out within a specific time period. It will contain details of your company, its products or services, its marketing objectives and strategies and information on how to measure the results of the marketing activities.
It might help if I give you a framework of basic elements that a Marketing Plan should include.
Basic Elements of a Marketing Plan
So what do you need?
1.Executive Summary – introduces and explains the major features and recommendations to executives (or your bank manager).
1.1 Introduction – a brief description of your organisation, its products and or services.
The context and objectives of the plan should be described and a description of what your business activities are. You should include current revenues, customers and your market position. You can also blow your own trumpet here! Note your accomplishments and successes to date.
If it is a new market entry or entirely new markets you are going for, then here is the place to describe any experience, training or competencies that your company has.
1.2 Vision, Mission Statement and Objectives
Mission statements focus on the long-range purpose of your marketing plan.
“To educate entertain and enlighten our clients so that they become more successful Marketers.”
Company objectives should be more specific and oriented towards action.
“We will deliver a balanced range of Marketing Solution Publications to the U.K. and Europe through mail order and Internet.”
1.3 Team description
Who will deliver the plan? What are the resources and structure of the team who will do so?
Management skills and capabilities. List any Marketing knowledge, sales skills, copy-writing ability, etc.
Agencies – Include any Marketing consultants, PR agencies you are using.
If there are any gaps honestly point them out and do a Training Needs Analysis.
1.4 Main marketing objectives
You need only give a brief statement of these here to close the Executive summary.
2.1 Current market conditions
What are the trends in your market?
What are the dynamics facing businesses such as yours?
Who are your target customers?
What competition do you face?
2.2 Market trends:
You should describe the macroeconomic trends that directly affect the target market that your marketing plan is aimed at.
This is where the PEST Framework is useful to include. (Sometimes referred to as PESTEL, SLEPT or PESTE) the components are:
Political
Economic
Social
Technological
Environment
Legal
2.3 Target market
It goes without saying that you should be aiming all your marketing efforts precisely at a target market or you are heading for a disaster.
All good marketing planning should follow from a very detailed segmentation of the market.
Size? Is it growing, staying the same, or shrinking?
Customer characteristics e.g. age, sex, income level, location, marital status, number of children etc.
Habits, patterns and values of target customer.
What are their wants, needs and desires?
What are their buying habits? – How do they spend their disposable income and when do they buy and how do they buy? How many times and when?
2.4 Competition analysis
In the micro environment analysis of a Marketing Audit you will hopefully have identified your present and potential competitors. What are their key products / services? How do they differentiate them selves? You should briefly explain the actions that you will take to oppose or overcome your competitor’s offerings.
I highly recommend you use Professor Michael Porter’s Five Forces Model for this and the four other threats he identifies. Space does not allow me to go into detail here although I have written a more comprehensive report in which I include a diagram of the Five Forces Model available from my own website.
2.5 Issues analysis
You should briefly list such key external issues as government legislation affecting your business, or new technological development that impinges on your product.
3.1 SWOT analysis
Strengths
Weakness
Opportunities
Threats
A major component of any marketing plan is the SWOT analysis. Strengths and weaknesses are born of internal elements while opportunities and threats come from outside.
When opportunities and threats are recognised they can then be examined from the point of view of your product strengths and weaknesses.
What could we change or improve about our product to make it easier for the customer?
What are our customers’ wants and desires? – We may possibly find new opportunities by thinking about such questions.
It is worth remembering that a threat can also be an opportunity to you, while a strength may also be a weakness depending on your point of view!
A business offering a vast selection of products may see this as one of their strengths. But for the customer, confused by the bewildering array of options as they try to find what they need, sees it as a weakness.
4. Positioning Strategy
Decide how you want your clients to perceive you in your marketplace.
Lowest price?
Best service?
Highest quality?
This is all part of the differentiation process.
5. Differentiation
You want to ’stand out from the crowd’ so you need to make some decisions on segmentation and the positioning of your business. Combine this with your competitive analysis and you should be able to differentiate yourself from the competition.
6. Key messages
Thinking about differentiation should also help you to decide on your ‘Key messages’. Be warned that it usually takes time for these to make an impact, to ’sink in’, as it were. This means it is important to keep repeating your consistent messages throughout any marketing campaigns.
7. The Marketing Mix
The 4 P’s.P is for:
Product – List your companies products and services. Include their key features. Is there something unique about them? If you are launching a new product or service include it here.
Price – There are many ways to set a price, some more scientific than others are! Remember that pricing is an integral part of the marketing strategy. Ask yourself is the customer willing to pay the price proposed and will it give you any profit? Some prices may be set on a cost-plus basis – adding a profit on to the costs of producing the goods or services. A better way is the ‘market-based’ price because it takes into account what your competitors are charging.
Place – where do you sell? Direct, through an intermediary? Bricks and mortar or virtual outlet?
Promotion – what activities are you going to use to create awareness of your product or service to generate sales? This is also referred to as Marketing Communications and includes direct selling, corporate events, brochures, web-sites, advertising. You should be warned that many inexperienced marketers think that the promotional plan is the entire marketing plan. It is, as you can see, but one component of the marketing plan.
7a. Integration of Promotional activity
Have you got a consistent look and feel to all your marketing mix? It is wise to make sure all your communications, brand positioning, propositions, messages, etc are derived from a single brand position so it is not confusing to the consumer by being fragmented. Also are there cross selling opportunities for you to exploit?
Only 4 Ps? – Funny, I thought I heard there were 7!
Before leaving the marketing mix I need to tell you about the Extended mix, which adds People, Process and Physical evidence to Product, Price, Place and Promotion.
If you are a service, or a not-for-profit organisation, then the extra three Ps are most important for you. But don’t just assume that because you are not, that they don’t apply!
People oriented organisations have to consider how their personnel make the marketing activities more, or less, effective when dealing face to face (or on the phone) with their public.
Process makes it easy for you to deal with the organisation. If it is a charity, for example, today people expect to be able to go on-line, set up direct-debits, pay by card and not just put money in the street collectors tin.
Physical evidence is expected to result from paying for a service or donating to a charity. You expect to see some physical evidence of the use your money has been put to.
8. Marketing Budget
You need a detailed budget for the next year showing the budgeted costs for each of your promotional items.
9. Measurement
Results and feed back must be gathered each month and compared with the marketing plan. When they are going astray you need to take corrective action.
Another tip is to ask your customers how they found you so that you can monitor what parts of your communications plan are working. Note this and include this in your measurements.
10. Milestones
It is a good idea to announce in the plan some marketing milestones you will strive to achieve. When you pass them celebrate!
So there it is a step by step process to create yourself a professional Marketing plan.
“A Marketing Plan to Copy” a more detaled report, is also available from the author, Nicholas Thorne, at http://www.promarketer.co.uk You see the marketing theory and models to use, plus a Free template and a copyright-free cut and paste plan. Nicholas Thorne holds a degree in Business Studies and is a Member of the Chartered Institute of Marketing in the United Kingdom. He is a business man with interests in bricks-and-mortar retail as well as on the Internet.
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Business Marketing Strategy
The term business marketing strategy might sound like it is esoteric or stratospheric, so let’s take the mystery out of it so you can devise and implement your own business marketing strategy that fits in to your small business plan.
Strategy comes from a Greek word “stratagein” meaning “to be a general”. Think of a strategy as an overall plan of action needed to win a war. The smaller, detailed actions are called tactics. You can have tactical plans which help you achieve your strategic marketing plan or overall business marketing strategy. That’s simple enough, isn’t it?
A business marketing strategy or strategic marketing plan is an overall plan of marketing actions you intend to take in order to accomplish a specific goal for your company.
Start with a goal: $2 million in sales this year; expand into new premises by a certain date; double the size of the company in 2 years… whatever the goal may be. Something realistic but challenging. That’s the “war” you want to win. Guess who the general is.
Then work out a simple, overall plan of the major marketing steps needed to accomplish that (for example):
1. Publish a newsletter for all existing customers and mail out quarterly.
2. Work out 4 special offers in the year and promote them to all our customers.
3. Set up on-line shopping and expand the web site.
4. Direct mail campaign promoting the web site to all customers.
5. Get mailing lists of (target markets) and do a series of 3 mailings of postcards to them and follow up on and close all leads.
6. Etc.
You get the idea. Don’t rush this. Do your homework. What worked in the past? Read up on successful marketing campaigns.
Your business marketing strategy needs to be laid out in the right sequence and you should have some idea of budget when you write it. “Run a series of 30 second TV ads during the Superbowl” might sound like a good thing to do but can you afford it? On the other hand, when you build your business marketing strategy you mustn’t try and cut corners. If you don’t promote heavily, it doesn’t matter how good your product or service is, no one will know about it and you will go broke.
What really works when it comes to marketing?
Many business owners don’t have a good enough answer to this important question. I learned by a combination of study and trial and error.
From my own hard won experienceI have discovered that a real marketing campaign will take into consideration at least the seven points which are outlined below:
1. Target Your Market
Your marketing will produce the best results for the lowest cost when you target prospects with the greatest need for what you offer.
Identify the best people to send your postcards to. Design your postcards to appeal to their greatest need.
If you are able to break down your target market into sub markets you can then write postcards that specifically speak to the needs of those people (an example is breaking down your own customer list into customers who buy most often, customers who spend the most money with you, customers who have been your customers the longest and then making them special offers based on the category they fit into).
2. Create A USP For Your Business
USP stands for “Unique Selling Proposition”.
It is a statement of what is different about your company and its products. Your USP gives the reason people should do business with you. It amplifies the benefit of doing business with you and your company. My USP is POSTCARD MARKETING EXPERTS.
Create your own USP and put it on all your promotional materials, invoices, shipping labels etc.
Use your USP to communicate the benefit of doing business with you and why you are better than any of your competitors.
3. Always Make an Offer
Make sure you ask your prospects and customers to do something when they receive your postcard. By offering them something you know they are likely to want and giving them a smooth path to respond on, you are making it easy and desirable for them to respond.
4. Create and Maintain a Database of The Customer Information You Collect From The Responses To Your Mailings
Most people who receive a postcard from you won’t contact you the first time they receive one.
But once they contact you, you must create and maintain a database which allows you to repeatedly contact them with offers to respond to.
Fifty percent or more of many businesses’ sales come as a result of following up with people who were previously contacted, but didn’t buy right away.
No kidding, repeat contact does drive sales. One-time mailings can get response, but are bound to leave sales on the table. Those sales can be picked up with repeated mailings.
5. Take Away the Fear of Loss
People don’t want to be fooled, plain and simple. Unfortunately trust does not run high today between customers and businesses in general. People have been disappointed too many times by being sold one thing and getting another.
A guarantee or warranty is a good way to reduce or eliminate the customers’ risk of getting something other than what they bargained for.
Guarantees and warranties increase response and sales by reducing customer risk.
6. Expand Your Product Line
Getting new customers is more expensive than selling to existing ones. By regularly developing new products and services to sell to your customers and offering these new products and services to them, you can expand your business efficiently and easily.
7. Test Your Postcard Promotions
Track the effectiveness of your postcard mailings. How many people responded to your mailing? What dollar amount of sales resulted from those responses?
Is the money you are spending to attract new business giving you a good return? What can you do to make your marketing more effective? Change your offer, headline, price, the timing of your offer. When you do track the results and improve your response.
These are the points to follow when designing your own marketing strategy. When you are done, you will have laid out the steps needed to accomplish your goal using existing resources to achieve a great marketing ROI (return on investment).
After that, you simply have to get those steps executed and that might require further planning but it is all in the context of your main business marketing strategy.
Joy Gendusa founded PostcardMania in 1998; her only assets a computer and a phone. In 2004 the company did close to $9 million in sales and employs over 60 persons. She attributes her explosive growth to her ability to choose incredible staff and her innate marketing savvy. Now she’s sharing her marketing secrets with others. For more free marketing advice, visit her website at http://www.postcardmania.com
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Pokemon - Episode 8: The Path To The Pokemon League (2/2 ...
E SPOT PROMO VIDEO
Small businesses rarely have the resources to maintain a large marketing budget. Every dollar spent on marketing or advertising must come back to the business in increased business or the expenditure should be seriously questioned.
However, effective marketing is vital to the success of any business. The old adage, “Build it and they will come,” rarely works when it comes to starting or running a business. You can have the best product or service in the market, but if no one knows about it or understands how it can help them, then sales will suffer.
Unfortunately, what works for one company may not be the answer for the next company. You may have a different target market, or need to reach your prospects through different channels. Understanding your target market is absolutely the most critical step to effective marketing. Before you begin any marketing, be sure you have thoroughly identified your target customer and understand what drives their buying decisions.
Once you understand your target / ideal customer and have developed your product to serve their needs then you can begin to design your message to reach them. Marketing mistakes can be costly to a small business and they are easy to make. With a bit of strategic thinking, mistakes can be avoided.
Here are seven of the common mistakes small businesses make and what you need to do to avoid them.
- Not tracking your marketing results. Test and measure is a phrase worth remembering and repeating often. Not tracking and testing your marketing programs is the biggest blunder small businesses make. This is so important because without understanding what is working and what isn’t, it becomes very easy to waste money on ineffective marketing. Knowing where your customers come from and what has attracted them to your company is the entire basis for developing where your future business comes from. Be sure that whenever you develop a new marketing program you also develop how to track the results. It doesn’t need to be a complicated tracking system. You just need to know how your customers found you. Without this you are marketing in the dark and your business revenue will likely stumble as a result.
- Not having a plan. Establish a budget for your marketing. Many businesses established a percent of revenue for the budget. The next step is to create a marketing plan that includes how, when, where and what you will market. Develop a marketing calendar showing all the programs you have planned. Indicate when you will start the planning, when the marketing will launch,, how long it will run and when you will close the campaign for tracking purposes. Having a plan will help keep you focused so you don’t miss important opportunities such as holidays, seasonal swings, and so forth.
- Failing to understand the difference between marketing and advertising. Many owners confuse marketing and advertising. As a result, they often do too much thoughtless advertising and not enough well thought out marketing. There is a distinct difference between the two. Advertising is reaching your target audience through specific mediums. Marketing is the strategy you employ to reach your target audience, including the planning and segmenting of your target. Marketing is a broader scope of all the activities you do to promote your services. For example, you decide you want to reach potential customers for your wedding planner service through an advertisement in the local newspapers insert for an upcoming bridal show. You run the ad and pay the paper a fee to do so. This is advertising. But, let’s say you contact the bridal show planners and offer to provide a talk on how to plan a great wedding on a budget. That’s free publicity, a great low cost addition to your marketing. It is important to do both advertising and the broader scope of marketing.
- Advertising in spots your customers don’t frequent. Advertising in publications or media that your target audience does not frequent will result in a poor return for your marketing dollars. Be sure you have identified where you will find your target audience and then advertise in those places. Your dollars need to go where the most people will view it when they need your service.
- Using the wrong, or not enough, channels effectively. Using multiple channels to deliver your message allows you to increase visibility, build awareness and reach different segments of your market. So much emphasis has been placed on internet marketing of late that other channels sometimes are ignored. When you analyze your target market make sure you understand all the different channels they use. A marketing campaign that addresses each market segment will tend to be more effective. A synergy will exist when your prospects see you through different channels. Then when they are ready to buy, you will be top of mind.
- Failing to grab your prospects with an attention getting headline. Studies show the headline is your opportunity to grab the reader’s attention and get them to review the rest of your message. People are bombarded every day with thousands of messages; you must be able to cut through the noise. A big, bold headline is critical to doing this. Spend some time studying how to write effective headlines and you will see an increase in your response. Again, be sure to test and measure your results with different headlines.
- Inconsistent marketing. Many small businesses tend to market sporadically when they need to increase business. When your marketing is inconsistent your prospects aren’t thinking about you when they are ready to buy. Don’t make the mistake of only marketing when business is slow. Develop a plan and execute it consistently to keep your message in front of your prospects.
A rule to remember is that marketing is everything and everything is marketing. Every time a customer or prospect interacts with your business it is marketing. Make sure you deliver a consistent message through everything you do. Paying attention to these simple rules will help your business deliver better results and allow you to turn your marketing dollars into an investment that helps your business grow.
To Your Success,
Dennis
Dennis A. Kelley, Author
The D. Kelley Group
http://www.AchievingUnlimitedSuccess.com
dennis@AchievingUnlimitedSuccess.com
Pokemon - Episode 10: Bulbasaur And The Hidden Village (1/2)
Are you waiting for the phone to ring? For people to walk through the door? For money to start flowing in?
Just because you are good at what you do or your product is great, people will not buy unless they know you are there. In my nearly 25 years as a marketing professional, I have heard just about every reason why some businesses never market their product or service. Do you recognize yourself in any of these scenarios?
A fellow business owner once sent out a targeted mailer with a special gift inside. A week went by and the phone did not ring off the hook. She stopped advertising.
An entrepreneur decided to advertise his new product, putting an ad in a trade newspaper and paying for a feature article about the product to be showcased in the paper. When he didn’t get an immediate response to his advertising, he considered the whole thing a failure and money wasted. I believe he’s out of business now.
A friend wanted to leave her brochures in a retail store I owned at the time, advertising a new bed and breakfast she recently opened. Leaving me just five brochures, I told her I would need a lot more. She said to just hand them out to serious customers; otherwise people would just take them!
If you can relate to these situations, then you should never market your business. It’s a waste of your time and money. Of course, without marketing, you risk failure. Many small and medium-sized businesses think this way and close their doors or never see the long-term potential of ongoing marketing. But wait! Even the phrase “ongoing marketing” conjures up all sorts of descriptive words like, expensive, complicated, time consuming and even frightening.
All these words add up to frustration for me, especially when business owners give me excuses for not marketing their company. And, I feel sorry for them because they just don’t get it. Ongoing marketing strategy doesn’t have to be complicated, expensive or frightening–it does have to be consistent.
The truth is that marketing is nothing more than a series of specific and often simple initiatives focused on promoting a product or service to a targeted audience. The plan should also have a good deal of flexibility so your marketing can adjust to fluctuations and changes.
Also, don’t put all your marketing dollars in one venue–mix it up. If you just invest in one type of marketing and it doesn’t work you might get paralyzed by the experience and be reluctant to spend any more time or money trying a different mix.
Variety in marketing works. Start with planning your strategy. Think about what you offer your customers and in which market you are likely to find them. Then, consider some low-cost, low-investment marketing opportunities to start with and give it time to develop. Here are a few strategies:
USE BUSINESS CARDS. Carry a lot of this basic marketing tool all the time. Always hand out two so your prospect can keep one and pass along the second to someone who may need your services or product. How many times have you wanted to tell someone about a business but didn’t want to give away your only business card? Paying your bill at a restaurant, dry cleaners, doctor’s office, coffee shop, car wash or other service? Leave your business card (and a pen with your name on it) with your payment. How many places do you go and see a pen with another business name on it?
PEOPLE LIKE GIFTS. Use a promotional product as part of your advertising mix, but be sure to choose a product that makes sense for your business and conveys the right message. For example, don’t give away a stress reliever squeeze toy if your product or service doesn’t relieve stress! And, don’t base your selection solely on the promotional product company that offers the cheapest price.
Stick to value and quality with both the promotional product and the vendor. Base your selection on your target audience and the message you want to convey. A good promotional products consultant will provide a promotional marketing plan for you and can assist you in selecting the best products, keeping you on target and on budget. Your business image depends on it.
USE PRINTED MARKETING MATERIALS. Your business image is important. Have a brochure or flyer professionally written by a copywriter, designed by a graphic artist and printed by a local print company. It doesn’t cost as much as you might think, and you might reap the benefit of additional cross-promotion business from these suppliers. Don’t try to save money by cranking out something from your office computer and printer. It will look “home-made” and so will your business.
Once completed, hand out your professionally produced materials liberally at networking events, conferences and trade shows. Ask other area businesses that compliment your business if you can leave some marketing materials with them to hand out.
You should also mail your brochures/flyers to your customer list along with a personal note thanking them for their business and asking for referrals.
Don’t be stingy with your marketing materials! In my experience, many potential customers keep good quality brochures and flyers on file and will eventually contact you when they have a need.
MARKET YOUR BUSINESS BY WEARING BRANDED APPAREL. Showcase your business everywhere you go. You most likely wear hats and t-shirts with names of other companies, resorts or sports teams on them. You are a walking advertising billboard for these businesses! Think of how many people see their name-not yours-this way! And you most likely paid them to do this!
If you’re going to wear logoed apparel, why not advertise your own? Wear imprinted apparel and accessories to work and everywhere! Wear them on the golf course, at a restaurant, at the gym or child’s sporting event. A good promotional products consultant can assist you with selecting both casual and business appropriate apparel and accessories. Then you can advertise your business even when you’re not “minding the store!”
REMEMBER YOUR EXISTING CUSTOMERS. Your most important asset is your customer base. It is your best source of repeat and referral business. Don’t let them forget you! Make sure you follow up with a courtesy call, an email, a flyer, a postcard, a newsletter or a promotional product gift, reminding them that you value their business. And, don’t just do it once. Make a habit of staying in touch on a regular basis. In today’s busy business environment, people won’t remember you on their own–make sure that your business doesn’t become one of the “forgotten.”
IF BUSINESS IS GOOD, DON’T ASSUME IT WILL ALWAYS STAY THAT WAY. Why am I including this? Because regardless of the economy, in good times and bad, you should never stop marketing. For example, I have hired some home improvement companies that, once they finished their projects, have never gotten in touch with me again. They never called to see how I liked their service and they never sent one piece of marketing material reminding me that they value my business. Perhaps at one time, business was good and they were busy. There was no time or need for marketing. Too bad. There were many times I could have used their services again or referred them to others. But, out of sight, out of mind!
Planting your marketing “seeds” now will help you reap customers in good and bad times.
YOUR SENSE OF URGENCY ISN’T NECESSARILY SHARED BY OTHERS. What happened? You’ve networked, passed out business cards, sent professionally printed marketing materials to clients and prospects, followed up with emails and phone calls. You wear your branded apparel everywhere. You have chosen and given away good promotional products. But, the phone isn’t ringing off the hook! Why is that? Maybe your sense of urgency is not necessarily shared by any of your prospects. Potential customers respond when they are ready. They remember and respond to a company that looks, acts and feels trustworthy, credible and professional. And, they only respond when they have a sense of urgency. Even with that, they generally only respond after they have seen or heard from you a minimum of seven times.
There is no magic bullet to marketing. It takes thought, persistence and a lot of patience. Just because you market your business does not mean that the money will immediately flow in and great success will follow in no time flat. Especially in a recession economy, it is important to keep marketing so you will be in position once things get better. You’ll lose ground if you don’t.
Your chances for consistent, long-term success are a lot greater if you at least do something.
©Copyright 2009 Carol A. Wilcox
Carol A. Wilcox is a marketing communications expert with over 25 years of diverse, entrepreneurial business experience. She is the CEO of Wild Dove Marketing, LLC, a full service, woman-owned marketing services and consulting agency headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona. Carol is also a coach, speaker and mentor to business owners and is the author of numerous marketing and business building articles. For more information visit her website at: http://WildDovePromos.com
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B2B Marketing Accountability: 5 Ways To Prove Your B2B Marketing Efforts Are Paying Off
Your boss wants to see evidence that the money and resources invested in the company’s business-to-business marketing activities are really paying off. You start to sweat.
Relax. It is surprisingly easy to prove that B2B marketing is contributing to your company’s bottom line. Here’s how.
Show the relationship between your marketing and your revenue
Start by looking for sales and revenue that can be linked to marketing activities. Simply compare lists of new customers or invoices to companies or prospects in your marketing database and look for matches. You don’t have to find every sale that resulted from your marketing activities. Sometimes all it takes is one big sale to justify a campaign.
If sales haven’t closed yet, count the number of qualified leads and use estimated conversion rates and average sales size to quickly determine the sales potential of those leads. Or look at the forecasted sales in the company’s CRM system and compare them to the database of prospects, inquiries or qualified leads.
You can also send “Did you buy?” surveys to inquirers and qualified leads, using their answers to show that the prospects being targeted by your marketing are buying from you or the competition. Ask if they bought, and if so, from whom. Ask why and how much they spent. If your sample size is large enough, you can also use the answers you receive to estimate the number of sales and the amount of revenue that are represented by all the inquiries and leads you’ve generated.
Show how much you saved the company
Just give it some thought and you’ll probably come up with a list of things you’ve done to save your company money or time. For example:
- Printing and postage savings after cleaning the mailing list or delivering the company newsletter by e-mail.
- Savings accomplished by offering electronic versions of literature.
- The money you saved by eliminating non-productive marketing activities
- Time and money saved by automating the capture of Web forms and eliminating some manual data entry.
Show other ways your marketing is more effective
This can range from showing how many more prospects you reached with your marketing messages to indicating the improvements that have been made in cost per impression, cost per inquiry, cost per attendee or cost per qualified lead.
List all the marketing projects your marketing team completed
Marketers often don’t think about their own productivity when justifying the money the company invests in marketing. Unfortunately, people quickly forget what happened last month or last quarter. Or they simply have no idea what’s involved in creating a mailing or designing a new Web site.
Pointing out the number of marketing projects completed, and all the work steps involved, can be a real eye-opener to others who are completely unaware.
Always be ready to make your case
I recommend that you block out a couple of hours to create your business-to-business marketing accountability reports every month so you’ll always have up-to-date results at your fingertips. If you’re pressed for time, use an intern or temp to do it for you.
Your results may vary, but consider this …
A marketer I know recently reported to her management that awareness of their company and products among target prospects more than doubled, the cost per qualified lead delivered to sales by marketing dropped by nearly 40 percent, 58 percent of the opportunities in the sales pipeline were found first by marketing, and 48 percent of the sales closed and 62 percent of the revenue during the past 12 months came from marketing-generated leads.
The result? She received a bigger marketing budget and senior management executives no longer doubt marketing’s contribution to the company’s success.
M. H. “Mac” McIntosh, is one of America’s leading business-to-business marketing consultant and an expert on the subject of B2B lead generation. Mac’s Accountability Audit helps marketing communications, advertising and tradeshow managers increase their B2B marketing budgets by proving a return-on-investment. For more info visit http://www.sales-lead-experts.com/blog/news-audits.cfm.
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Forget Strategy – SENSIBLE Marketing Is the Way to Go!
Strategy is a word that marketers cling to in order to justify the business value of marketing. Anything with value needs to have strategy, right? It’s good business…the stroking of chins, the facilitated brainstorming sessions, the neatly formatted “strategic marketing plan” that results from all that creative thinking about what needs to be put into place.
Marketers as a group have an inferiority complex. We are defensive because we don’t directly contribute to revenues, the results we do produce tend more towards the intangible side of the business, and the marketing part of the budget is high relative to other business functions. We believe (often with
reason) that other members of the management team consider us with raised eyebrows, trying to figure out what exactly we are bringing to the party. Hypersensitive types that we are, we assert our importance on the team by stressing the “strategic” value of marketing.
Strategic marketing and marketing strategy are meaningless terms to most small and medium business owners. There is no time for brainstorming sessions and no money for facilitators and fancy plan documents. Everybody is too busy working to improve the bottom line–increasing revenues and decreasing costs–to place any importance on “strategy” when it comes to marketing activities. Getting the brochure done, putting a web site in place and keeping it maintained, and sending out a newsletter–those are things that will produce immediate results,
and are therefore more important to dedicate resources toward than activities around “strategic marketing planning.”
But wait. I am not saying that business-oriented marketing planning isn’t necessary. Without some sort of planning, the brochure, web site, and newsletter are created as separate items with no similarities and no tie-in to overall business
objectives. Costs are often high in dollars and time while results are low. It can be frustrating to look at the income and expense statement, see all those marketing dollars on the expense side with no upswing in revenue to associate
with those costs.
You do need some kind of marketing plan, but instead of calling it strategic, let’s call it sensible.
– A plan that makes sense given your business objectives, your budget, and your labor resources.
– A creative road map that gets the most bang for your marketing buck, not a fancy formatted document resulting from a high-priced facilitated session.
– And a record of specific metrics that will be used to measure the effectiveness of your road map so that adjustments can be made enroute.
Your plan doesn’t need to be a fat document; it may only be a couple of pages. It does need to clearly set out at least the following point:
– Your marketing goals for the period that the plan covers (these need to align with your business goals for that same period).
– A summary of your target market profile, including competitors as well as prospective customers.
– A Distinct Value Statement for each discrete target customer group that succinctly defines the value your products or services offer it.
– A summary of each marketing activity you will pursue during the plan period, a timeline for them, and how they integrate.
– The specific metrics you will use to gauge the effectiveness of plan activities.
When you have created this road map, use it. All of it, including the metrics. And be prepared, based on your results, to make adjustments as you go.
Sensible marketing starts sensible planning. If you have not made a plan, I suggest you stop, take a step back, and create a marketing plan that fits your needs. You will produce far more marketing results by having a plan in place. You will also understand what your marketing investment has returned and where
the best results have been produced. And that is sensible business!
Trish Lambert, president of 4-R Marketing LLC (http://www.4rmarketing.com), is an experienced marketing consultant and creator of the 4-R Marketing Model™ for service businesses. Very much a “non-conformist” in the marketing world, Trish creates campaigns and programs that make sense for her clients, that can be clearly measured, and that produce the targeted results.
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Pokemon - Episode 8: The Path To The Pokemon League (2/2 ...