Marketing Tips

IT Marketing

2011-11-17T12:06:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-16T12:20:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-15T11:23:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-14T13:56:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-11T09:56:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-10T10:30:00.000-08:00

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.

Marketing Automation Information - Shows the real deal behind marketing automation and what you need to be doing now to nurture your leads.
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.
Marketing Tools - A suite of tools that helps you measure and analyze your marketing efforts.
Marketing Hubs - Resources for your every marketing need from inbound marketing to online video marketing.
Internet Marketing Whitepapers - A list of e-books and online resources to help with your business and marketing.
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

2011-11-09T09:20:00.000-08:00

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.

Marketing Tactics

2011-11-07T12:33:00.000-08:00

We've touched on the subject of what some of the best ways are to market yourself and/or your business. I'm going to dig a little deeper into that and let you know what some of the most important tactics are that you need to do to ensure that you have a good marketing plan in place.

First of all, you need to be honest. Tell the truth. It is tempting, I know, to shape facts to help make it easier to sell your products. The essence of being truthful is your ability to compare your information products and services with similar or competitive products, factually. Don't use metaphors when describing your products.

Build relationships with prospective and current customers. People who buy information products and services is small in comparison with the number of people who sell information products. Selling information has more in common with selling a service than selling the actual product. So make sure you have good customer service. Bad customer service includes things like a clumsy telephone call, multiple representatives calling on the same prospect without coordinating visits, or a self-serving newsletter filled with puffery.

Set high standards, and meet them. Deliver a product or service that meets your personal standards of excellence. Be proud of the work that you're performing. Individuals govern the quality of the information product and energize organizations to make the excellence routine.

Meet a real need. To do this is little more than solving a problem for someone. Keep in mind that the problem can be solved with a product or service. Whatever the problem is be able to fix it with your product.

Have a focus in mind. Find a niche and fill a need within it. The more precisely you can define a niche and the need for your product, the greater your chance is of success. It's easier to find an empty niche and create a product that meets a specific need within that than to try and create a product which is ail things to ail people.

Seek out friends. Position your product to win friends, not make enemies. In a business, it is rare that a single source can answer a complex question adequately. Professionals recognize the complementary nature of their products, and established companies realize the supporting roles that products play. It is not smart to attack a competitor in his market niche head on. They can cut prices or offer a package of services the newcomer can't match. So establish a complementary relationship among marketers, their products, and services.

Remain steady and be consistent. Consistency in product positioning is critical. Repositioning can be successful but only if handled with care. The more a product is repositioned, the more the message is sent out that the people making the product don't have their act together.

Persevere. What that means is you need to stand behind your product. It takes time for a product to take hold in the marketplace. Very few products can be an instance success. If you introduce a product and quit, it just becomes more difficult to get support for the next product. It's better to create a prodcut, work at it, and fail than to just pull the plug.

Educate. Keep this formula in mind: F-A-B. Features, Advantages, Benefits. Marketers need to explain the features of the product and what it does. Then tell of the technical advantages of the particular product by showing competing products as lacking these advantages. Lastly, tell the customer how the product or service will benefit him/her - like that it saves time or money, or even improves their life.

These are just a few of many tactics that you should keep in mind when developing and selling a new product or service. Follow some of these tips and you'll realize that success if not just about the best in the business, but maybe just providing the best business to your customers.

Marketing Segmentation

2011-11-03T12:32:00.000-07:00

A market segment is a sub-set of a market. It's made up of people or organizations with one or more characteristics that make them demand similar products or services based on qualities of those products. A true market segment meets the following criteria:

It's distinct from other segments
It is homogeneous within the segment
Responds similarly to a market stimulus
Can be reached by a market intervention

There may be ideal market segments depending your product or service. The people in a given segment are supposed to be similar in terms of criteria by which they are segmented. You can split the market into smaller groups by:

gender
price
interests
location
religion
income
size of household

And I'm sure there are a number of other ways you can sort groups, but those are some suggestions. In reality every organization engaged in a market will develop different ways of imaging market segments and create product differentiation strategies, which can give a firm a temporary commercial advantage.

The advantages to this type of marketing is that you target a certain audience that would be interested in your product. That's not to say that people outside of that realm wouldn't have an interest. Keep that in mind if you decide to market this way. You might have a good chance of getting the people you want, but you also risk leaving out people that could potentially want what you have to give, because you simply think they are not in a targeted group that you would want.

Share Marketing

2011-11-02T12:12:00.000-07:00

Market share is the percentage of a proportion of the total available market or market segment that is being serviced by a company. It can be expressed as a company's sales revenue divided by the total sales revenue available in that market. Or it can be the company's unit sales volume divided by the total volume of units sold in that market. Generally, it's necessary to commission market research to determine which is the correct solution to use.

Increasing these shares is one of the most important objectives of business. The primary advantage is that is is less dependent on macroenvironmental variables like the state of the economy or changes in tax policy. But, increasing market share may be dangerous for makers of fungible hazardous products, especially sold in the U.S., where they may be subject to market share liability.

Marketers need to be able to translate sales targets into market share because it will demonstrate whether forecasts are to be attained by growing with the market or capturing share from competitors. The latter is almost always more difficult to achieve.

Basically, market share is a key indicator or market competitiveness, or how well a firm is doing against its competitors. This metric is intended to help managers evaluate primary and selective demand in their market. This way, they can judge not only total market growth or decline but also trends in customers' selections among competitors.

As far as calculating, there is no generally acknowledged best method for calculating it. Different methods yield different computations of market share at any given moment, but also widely divergent trends over time.

The primary way to calculate, however, is simple. Take the firm's sales and divide it by total market sales and the answer is the firm's market share.

Some reasons you may want to increase your market share are for sales growth and reputation. Some good ways to increase your market share are to change some of the variables in your marketing. Make your product more valuable, put a decrease in your prices because you will then increase your sales revenue, add new distribution channels, and increase promotions through advertising expenditures.

There are some reasons you may not want to increase market share. If the firm is near production capacity, and increase might necessitate investment in additional capacity, and if it is then underutilized it will result in higher costs. Also, overall profits might decline if market share is gained by increasing promotional expenditures or by decreasing prices. A price war might be provoked if competitors try to regain their share by lowering their prices. A small niche player may be tolerated if it captures only a small share of the market. If that share increases, a larger and more capable competitor may decide to enter the niche. Lastly, antitrust issues may arise if a firm dominates its market.

A firm could even decrease market share if they are able to identify certain customers that are unprofitable. You could drop those customers and lose market share while improving profitability.

Integrated Marketing Communications

2011-10-31T10:13:00.000-07:00

Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) is basically putting together a number of different marketing solutions to better communicate and manage customer relationships. It includes the use of all marketing communication tools, avenues, and sources within a company into one seamless program to maximize the impact on users at minimal cost. This affects all firm's business-to-business, marketing channel, customer-focused, and internally directed communications.

There are several components that are used in this type of communication aspect, such as the foundation, advertising tools, promotional tools, and integration tools. The foundation is the corporate image and brand management, buyer behavior, and promotions opportunity analysis. Advertising tools are for advertising management, advertising design through theoretical frameworks and types of appeals, advertising design, messages strategies, educational frameworks, and advertising media selection. Advertising is also good for reinforcing brand and firm image.

Promotional tools are those like trade promotions, consumer promotions, personal selling, database marketing, customer relations, public relations, and sponsorship programs. Integration tools consist of internet marketing, IMC for small business and entrepreneurial ventures, evaluation and integrated marketing programs.

IMC has developed into a primary strategy for marketers from media advertising to multiple forms of communication. From mass media to more specialized media, centered for a target audience. From a manufacturer-dominated market to a retailer-dominated and consumer-controlled market. From a general-focus advertising and marketing to a marketing that is data-based. From low accountability from agents to a greater accountability, especially in advertising. From traditional compensation to performance-based compensation. From limited internet access to 24/7 internet availability and access to goods and services.

In short, let me give you the 4 Ps vs. 4 Cs. It's not about product, but it's about the consumer. It's not about price but about cost (which includes quality for your product). It's not about place, but convenience. Lastly, it's not about promotion but communication.

So combine as many aspects as possible into your marketing campaign, and you'll have an integrated setting. Don't limit your marking communications to JUST e-mail or JUST social media, do both, and then do some more! Get the word out in as many ways possible.

HR Marketing

2011-10-28T09:31:00.000-07:00

HRM (Human Resource Marketing) is a new term that many companies are beginning to use. It is important to positively market the company brand both internally to current employees and externally to potentials. If you make your company more marketable in a recruitment sense, you will be able to attract people with higher quality who will aspire to be part of the organization.

Developing this strategy will need to involve expertise from across a range of functions within the company: human resources (of course), marketing, public relations (PR), legal, accounting, and management will have a vital role in designing a solution to increase the company's profile and profitability.

Even if you are not recruiting at the moment, you still want to do this strategy in order to not only attract high-caliber people, but to retain them. You want to have a positive employment profile to promote your company's employees' values. Entail your encouragement and acceptance of their beliefs and attitudes to showcase a positive working environment. If you don't recognize your employees, then it makes it a challenge to attract new ones that want to work for you.

Strong brands have four classic effects on markets: reduce acquisition costs, create relationships between consumers and producers, increases loyalty, and consumers expect to pay more for strong brands. These effects are now not only being used on consumers, but employees. If a company has a strong employer brand and leverages it correctly, the factors can take effect for talent. With a strong employer brand the costs of employee acquisition decrease, and the relationships between employees and employer increase.

These factors also can increase the average length of the employee's retention and companies can attract the same type of people, yet offer significantly lower salaries than competitors with weaker brands. Most HR departments are still struggling with the challenge or understanding, measuring, and the positioning their employ brands.

The challenge is not to train HR in branding, but to attempt a unification between marketing and HR. Most companies separate the two groups from each other. Firms that unite them can win the war for talent.

Marketing Concepts

2011-10-26T14:32:00.000-07:00

There are several concepts that help make marketing a business successful. Follow these guidelines and you're sure to market well and gain visitors to your website or place of business.

Marketing is the process of planning and executing pricing, promotion, and distribution to satisfy individual and organizational needs. So marketing is more than just selling a product or service. Marketing consists of the four Ps: Product, Place(Distribution), Promotion, and Pricing. Before an owner can make decision on the four Ps, they need to come up with a plan that provides guidance on making decisions. Let's go over some of the steps on how to devise that plan in just six stages.

First, come up with a mission statement. That is a brief description of your company, just a few lines long, which describes where the company is and where it wants to go. It needs to contain target customers, products, geographic domain, technologies used, commitment to profitability, philosophy, concept, and images. This does not happen quickly; it usually takes a few revisions before it's complete.

Next, you need to decide on some overall company objectives. Those are the specific goals that you want to achieve through the business, plans that will help the company move forward to meet that mission statement. Come up with some objectives for one year, and some for up to three years. Some examples include an objective of earning at least 20% after taxes of return on your net investment in a one year span, or to make the best selling cookies in terms of unites sold in Texas. Objectives can be profitability, volume, stability, or nonfinancial (like improved corporate image or enhancement of technology). You also want to make sure those objectives meet some criteria: are they suitable, measurable, feasible, acceptable, flexible, motivating, understanding, and involve participation and commitment?

After you have a few objectives set up, the next thing you need to do is come up with some competitive strategies so that your company can create advantages over the competition. Some examples of this are offering buyers a standard product at a lower price, or making the product different then the competitors on important attributes to the customer. Be a low-cost manufacturer, produce products that are easy to manufacture on a large scale which access low-cost raw materials. Differentiate the product so it seems unique by giving it quality, technical superiority, and making it appeal to have more value for the cost.

Once all of those steps are in place, you can move on to marketing objectives. These are designed to help a company attain overall objections like achieving a viable level of sales or market share, increasing market share, maintaining that market share, maximize cash flow, and sustain the profitability.

Then you can develop your marketing strategies which decides the position a product or service needs to be in for buyer needs and wants. Inexperience business people sometimes make their decisions on marketing based on what THEY like or what THEY want, so the focus needs to be on the consumer. To do this increase the number of users (build a willingness and ability to buy), the rate of purchase (broaden usage for products, increase level of consumption and replacement), retain current customers (maintain satisfaction, meet what competitors offer, market a relationship), and acquire new customers (line extensions, leaders, bundling, differentiate the product, narrow target, flankers).

The last step in your marketing process is coming up with marketing programs. These are the detailed approaches to the four Ps we discussed earlier (products, place, promotion, and pricing). The approaches for these decisions should follow your mission statement, company objectives, competitive strategies, marketing objectives, and marketing strategies. They are all incorporated with one another and this final step consists of promoting your products, place, and pricing. Promoting consists of advertising, publicity, and sales promotion. Do product demonstrations, send out direct mail or business cards, go to seminars, create contests, flyers, and window banners. You can advertise in newspapers, on the radio, in magazines, and on TV. Offer coupons to customers in which you can have a certain one for current customers and a different one for new customers. This is another way to keep the ones you have while bringing in new visitors.

There are many other ways to promote and advertise your products, place, and pricing to consumers, including the newly popular online social media market. Whatever works best for you and whatever you believe will get the most people to purchase your products over the competitors' is what you need to strive for. Follow these steps, in the order in which they are written, and you are sure to be a success. Keep in mind at all times, that your goal is customers. To get them, to please them, and to keep them. Stick with these concepts and you'll be able to do all of that and your business will stick around.

Marketing Planning Process

2011-10-20T13:40:00.000-07:00

Starting a business begins with having a strategy. Marketing, of course, is one of the biggest aspects of that strategy that you want to have in place. Strategic planning is about the overall direction of the business. It involves decision-making about production, operations, finance, and other business issues.

Now the objective of a strategic plan is to set the direction of a business and create its shape so the products and services meet the objectives.

To meet those objectives, a key role is marketing. You need to understand and manage the connections between the business and the environment to perform the job of marketing management. In many small businesses, that can be pretty straight forward, especially if there is only one geographical market and a small number of products.

However, if you are in charge of marketing for a multinational business, where there are hundreds of businesses all over the world, with a wide variety of products, it can be a bit more challenging.

Follow these steps to plan your marketing strategy. First, get an executive summary, which includes current situations, both good and bad. Then you want to analyze those situations, based on strengths and weaknesses. Then you'll do marketing research to come up with a marketing strategy, which should include product, target audience, how to promote, how to distribute, and then actually implementing that plan. Once that stage is going, you want to do a financial summary. To do that, ask yourself the following questions.

Where are we now?
How did we get to this point??
Where does the future lead?
Where would we LIKE the future to lead?
How do we get to that point?
Are we headed in the right direction?

Then you can being the last step in the planning process of coming up with scenarios. Asking yourselves these questions along the way helps you make sure that you are where you expected, or wanted to be, at certain points in the process. If you're not where you thought or hoped you would be, then maybe you need to change something in your business or in your marketing strategies.

Having a marketing plan helps to identify competition, commit yourself, collect resources to help build the business, set objectives, and measure performance. This will keep you always asking those questions above and keeping committed to where you want to go.

What is Integrated Marketing

2011-10-19T10:37:00.000-07:00

"In the nonprofit world, true integrated marketing is centered around the concept of having a comprehensive view of the constituent. Ideally, the organization has full access to online engagement data for mining and can use that data to engage constituents both offline and online. There is also a need to have robust reporting capabilities that enable a nonprofit to plan and execute integrated campaigns, and create engagement pathways. This meeting of the offline and online channels - and ensuring consistent, coordinated communications across both of them - represents true integrated marketing."

That is the given definition by Convio's Chief Technology Officer, Dave Hart. But what does that even mean? It is basically a strategy that is aimed at unifying different marketing methods (like mass marketing or direct marketing). The objective is to compliment and reinforce the market impact of each method, as well as to employ the market data generated by these efforts in product development, pricing, customer service, etc.

Bringing offline engagement data and online data together can enable personalized interaction with customers and business handlers.

For example, a direct mail appeal can be targeted at a member who signed up online for a program-specific e-newsletter. Or a renewal time can be established - the customer can be reminded and thanked for all their interactions over the previous year (month, day, whatever), both giving and other engagements. And a strong record of interaction might identify excellent prospects for major human contact.

Having integrated marketing can get you twice as much from customers as the ones who do not receive electronic communication. And typically, those customers who receive marketing from both channels give as much through offline sources as offline ONLY customers, which shows that the online channel does not ruin revenue from direct mail.

So in short, integrated marketing gives you a chance to reach out to customers twice as much as just offline or just online alone would give you. It's something worth considering for your business.

Developing a Promotional Strategy

2011-10-18T09:58:00.000-07:00

Promoting your business is one of the key elements in marketing. One of the major roles of promotion is deciding on a marketing communications strategy. These decisions depend on who your customers are, how to contact them, and what the message should be.

First thing you need to do is segmentation. What this means is you need to divide your potential customers into groups to increase the success rate of communications. If you don't know who you're talking to, it's not likely you will get a response. Once you have an idea of who your customers are, you need to explore them. Find out what their media habits, their expectations, their priorities, their budget for your product, and their buying habits. To do this you can use questionnaires, website statistics, focus groups, and even face-to-face interviews.

Once you have an idea of who your customers are, then you need to target. There are a number of things you should do to get your company name out there and target those customers. First thing is to advertise. Advertise in magazines, on TV, or on the radio. Then promote your sales. Offer coupons and discounts, as well as incentives for purchasing a product with your company. Now a days, of course, it is monumental to have digital marketing, as well. This means having a website, being part of a social media network or two, and blogging. When marketing, you want to make sure your message is relevant and clear to get your target audience and obtain customers.

So once you market, you then need to begin positioning. What this means is that you need to develop an image for your company or product. You can do this through branding, on the packaging or posters. Come up with a design or name that represents your company and put it on all outgoing mail or on your website.

Once you have established all of these components, you need to develop your message. When sending out messages to customers, make sure you are informing first - explaining to them what your company does and what kind of products you sell. Then persuade them to check out your website or come visit your store to generate an interest. Lastly, remind them of your products to maintain that interest.

If you have these strategies and do them in this order, your business can be a success. The marketing game is all about getting your company's name out there and making sure plenty of people know what it is you do and what you sell.