IT Marketing

Information and Technology (or IT) based marketing addresses how to use information technology to learn about and market to individual customers. There are two important effects for marketing that I will share with you today.

For one, many businesses now have more information about consumers' choices and their reactions to marketing campaigns. But only a few of these companies have the expertise to wisely act on that information. You'll need to collect, analyze, and act on that customer information.

The second effect is that IT has changed the competitive environment for many businesses - consumers now have more information about competitive offerings thanks to the internet, which allows many competitors to market consumers directly. So you need to focus on how to adapt marketing strategy to an environment of more informed customers, more flexible competitors, and additional ways of reaching customers.

So while marketing is going through quite an evolution from having been primarily an art to becoming a science, you'll need to learn the crucial part of the scientific approach to marketing.

Channel Marketing

Channel marketing is the directing of promotional efforts at specific links or levels (distributor, wholesaler, retailer) in a channel of distribution. It's the method of getting your product into the hands of the customers'. This can be done through direct sales or resellers. Direct sales can occur in person, over the phone, web, or mail. Indirect, or channel sales, typically refers to the sales through the resellers. A reseller can order from you directly or from a wholesale distributor.

So which channel should you use? Most times, the answer is both, especially with the growth of popularity of the internet. But you want to avoid channel conflict. That occurs when vendors and resellers compete for the same business. To minimize this conflict you can segment the products, setup exclusive or limited territories, sell direct at a higher price than the average street price, setup different promotions for different resellers - rotating so they all have advantages at different times, provide co-op and let the resellers choose to establish their own competitive advantage, setup reseller levels by rewarding higher margins and support for higher authorization, or setup a process to determine if a customer has worked with a reseller prior to taking the business direct.

Now channel sales are the overall account liaisons and are primarily responsible for selling products into distribution and the reseller channel. This kind of marketing is responsible for ensuring that product in distributor and reseller locations gets sold out. So channel sales ensures sell-in and the marketing of that ensures channel sell-through.

A channel marketing manager works with the head of channel sales to do the following: establish a competitive reseller program, help recruit resellers, prepare the proper reseller collateral, create reseller kits, manage reseller database and partner relationship management software, jointly invest the market development funds to increase channel sell-through, which is accomplished through managing store and distributor promotions, ensures proper merchandising, ensures adequate stocking levels, runs reseller education, sets up motivational contest to reward sales, and manages seeding programs.

If you incorporate all of this together you can have a great channel marketing system in place.

Shopper Marketing

Shopper marketing is where you understand how your target consumers behave as shoppers. You need to leverage this knowledge to the benefit of all stakeholders (brands, consumers, retailers, shoppers). This type of marketing includes management, displays, sales, packaging, promotion, and research.

It is not limited to just in-store marketing activities. It needs to be a part of an overall integrated marketing approach that considers the opportunities to drive consumption and identify the shopper that needs to purchase a brand to enable said consumption. You need to understand these shoppers in terms of how well they interpret the needs of the consumer, what their needs are as a shopper, where they're likely to shop for those needs, in which stores they can be influenced in, and what in-store activities influence them.

Basically, you need to have shopper insight. What that is is a focus on the process which takes place before the first thought the consumer as about making a purchase all the way until they select that particular item. This type of marketing challenges the assumption that the shopper and the consumer are one in the same.

It's important for many reasons, especially that manufacturers spend vast amounts of money on it, and those amounts are increasing. Many organizations even spend over 8% of total sales on in-store marketing; when total trade spend is added up it can often top 40% of total revenue.

With shopper marketing, manufacturers target parts of their marketing towards specific retailers or retail environments. This kind of targeting depends on congruency of objectives, targets and strategies between the manufacturer and a given retailer.

Tourism Marketing

Tourism is huge in so many countries. There are some countries that even depend on tourism as their source of income, so it's very useful to know how to promote tourism. Following, I will give you some pointers on how best to market tourism to bring visitors to your country, state, city, wherever you want them to go.

First, of course, is advertising. You need to make your business known through radios, TV, magazines, posters, newspapers, brochures, anything else you can possibly think of. One big thing right now is social media, so create your own personal business page for your city or state or country and post it where people from all around the world can check it out and see what you have to offer.

Encourage internal tourism. What this means, is that you want people to come to your state, and once there you want to encourage them to go to specific places inside the state. Promoting others will help promote yourself.

Preserve the existing attractions and create new ones. So keep what you already have maintained. That's sometimes the worst part. If you have something that you're advertising that can attract a great deal of people but then it's not well taken care of, it could fall apart and you could lose one of the biggest reasons people come to see your location in the first place. And on top of that, you want to create new ones. You don't want to have just ONE thing for families to do while they're in town. Give them a few reasons to stay a while.

Improve on accommodations and health services to attract tourists. If they know that there are good places to stay, eat, and go to in emergencies, they're more likely to trust where it is they're going. They want to know that while they are there to have fun at your amazing attractions, they can also stay in a clean, inexpensive hotel, eat good food, and have a place to get medical aid if need be.

Train some tour guides and hotel workers for easy communication and good service. These hotel workers are the first people that tourists see. And they will continue to see them as long as they're staying there. If hotel workers know where to send them, then those tourists will have a good time.

Improve your transportation facilities by purchasing modern tour vehicles (like buses or trams) and modernize roads for tourist attraction. I know many cities now have quick transportation systems that go from stop to stop to allow tourists to get off and on as they please whenever a bus or tram comes along. Have the roads set up for it and allow for modernized transportation that make it easier for tourists to check out multiple venues in one day.

Organize package tours and improve on security. One good example of this that I experienced relatively recently was when I went to Boston, MA. We wanted to take a look around at different attractions and they actually offered packages for this. We were able to take a bus tour from one stop to the next, and get off and on any time we wanted to. We were able to stop at monuments, buildings, almost anywhere that we wanted to. Once there, we were able to spend as much time as we wanted walking around and looking at the sites.

These are just a few tips that can help promote your city to attract tourists. Give them a reason to come see you, and a reason to stay, and they will. Make sure while they're there, they receive amazing accommodations, as well as site-seeing and great tours.

Industrial Marketing

Industrial marketing is the marketing of goods and services by one business to another. Industrial goods are those that an industry uses to produce an end product from one or more raw materials. Another word for this is B2B (or business to business) marketing.

There are a few main features of this kind of selling process. One is that marketing is one-to-one in nature. That means that it's relatively easy for the seller to identify a potential customer and build a face-to-face relationship. Highly professional and trained people in buying processes are involved. So in a lot of cases, a few decision makers must approve a purchase. A lot of times the buying and selling process is complex and includes many stages: request for proposal, request for tender, selection process, awarding of tender, contract negotiations, and signing of final contract. Selling activities involve long process as well of prospecting, qualifying, wooing, making representations, preparing tenders, developing strategies, and contract negotiations.

I will give you an example of the industrial marketing process. An organization wants to build a new warehouse. After documenting what is required, they obtain three proposals from suitable construction firms. After evaluating and negotiating, they place an order with an organization that they believe will offer the best value for their money.

Another organization needs legal services and receives submissions from two law firms. They analyze the proposals and discussions to determine that there is no price advantage to placing all of the work with just one firm, so they decide to split the work between the two firms based on evaluation of each firm's capabilities.

A sales representative with a company makes and appointment with an organization that employs just 22 people. That representative demonstrates a photocopier/fax/printer to the office administrator. After discussing a proposal, the owner of the business signs a contract to obtain that machine on a fully maintained rental and consumables, with an upgrade every 2 years.

Those are just a few examples that can show you the process that goes into industrial marketing. There are many more examples and real-life instances that you could probably think of yourself. Is this kind of marketing right for you and your business?

Resources for Marketing

There are so many resources and websites out there now that it's hard to figure out which ones can really help you. I'm going to give you a list of some great marketing resources you can take advantage of that will hopefully help you with your marketing endeavors.

1. Marketing Automation Information - Shows the real deal behind marketing automation and what you need to be doing now to nurture your leads.
2. Marketing Kits - A series of different "kits" that can help you with your marketing, depending on what it is your looking for. There is a range from public relations  and inbound lead generation to mobile marketing and social media marketing.
3. Marketing Tools - A suite of tools that helps you measure and analyze your marketing efforts.
4. Marketing Hubs - Resources for your every marketing need from inbound marketing to online video marketing.
5. Internet Marketing Whitepapers - A list of e-books and online resources to help with your business and marketing.
6. Marketing Examples - Examples of people who have used resources to help build their websites and marketing campaigns.

That's a fairly short list, I realize. But it is loaded with great information that you can use to build up your marketing. There are, of course, many other resources that can be found on the web that can help you with what you want to do, but these are some that I would recommend you check out first.

Marketing Skills

Many organizations are struggling to find the right people to ensure their success for their marketing efforts. Following, I will give you a few skills you should look for in future marketing employees to fill that potential skills gap.

Make sure they have an understanding and willingness to work with sales. Everybody works for money, it's true. Don't blame the sales team for being the same way, but instead, marketers would do well to know the sales person's perspective. A marketer who understands and values the sales person's view point can be invaluable to your team. Sales people are the ones that spend the most time with customers and would best know the voice of the customer. The best marketers are of then the ones that have been in sales as some point in their career. They can use that experience to connect with the sales team to create programs that sales will agree with.

They should possess a process-based approach to lead management. One of the keys to marketing is to develop the right business process. This requires thinking at an operation level; the most important area of lead management. Someone who views their role as just filling the top of the funnel will not be of much benefit to an organization that develops their process through every step or phase of that funnel. By performing the latter, the goal is now focused on lead quality instead of quantity, which increases the likelihood of producing more revenue because sales spends more time on higher-quality leads. A marketer who is process-minded will quickly stand out.

You want them to have knowledge about direct marketing. What this means is a marketer who has proficiency in online, offline, inbound, and outbound marketing. They know that it takes more than just a pretty design or catchy phrase to engage potential customers. Listening to a prospect is just as important than speaking to one. This marketer has mapped content to each stage of the buyer's journey and they understand the value of engaging the customer in meaningful conversation to further a relationship. They realize that if the relationship with the customer is done correctly, it will enhance the corporate brand which will achieve two objectives at once.

The marketer that you're looking for needs to understand the role of technology. Though technology can definitely help with some current processes, like communication with your customers, it is not the savior to your marketing challenges. A good marketer will understand that technology can and should play a part and how it can help enhance the overall communication to the customer.

Lastly, they need to know how to market by numbers. Good marketers are pushed by metrics. They use numbers to see their ROI on campaigns, track the marketing contribution to revenue, measure conversions along the sales funnel and use the business intelligence in their metrics to help plan for the future. Next time you're looking to fill a position for your marketing group, make sure one of the roles listed in the criteria is "metrics driven." Have all the candidates show examples of how they measured marketing effectiveness previously.

As business market place continues to change, it is important that you have the right people filling the right roles to make sure you're engaging with your customers, aligning with sales, and having a positive impact on revenue. Organizations that understand the people of the equation will be a step ahead of their competitors.