Marketing Campaign How To Come Up With One

Any business will never be able to survive without any form of marketing. But staging a marketing campaign isn’t easy. If you aren’t careful, it can bring your business down and drain all your finances.

To come up with a foolproof marketing campaign for your business, take note of these tips:

1. Create a marketing plan. What’s the main use of a marketing plan? With it you can answer the following questions:

Who are your target market?
What kinds of marketing strategies will work?
Where are the best places to promote the product?
How do you present the product to the target market?

You also need the marketing plan when you have to assess your marketing objectives. This is how you’ll know if you’re still in line with your business goals. You can also evaluate if your business goals are still sound or if you need to change them.

2. Combine online marketing and local marketing. Because the Internet is the rave, it’s common for businesspeople to solely depend on it for the marketing of their products and services. Don’t. There are still thousands of people who are not in the World Wide Web.

You also have to create and perform local marketing strategies, including giving away of business cards, putting up tarpaulins and signs, sending samples, joining fairs, or convincing friends and family to spread good words about your business.

For your online marketing, you can consider doing the following:

newsletters
e-books
website
blog
microblogging platforms like Twitter and Plurk
Facebook
article directories
directories and search engines
social bookmarks
e-mail blasts

3. Come up with a USP. What’s a USP? It stands for unique selling proposition. You have to determine what sets your product or service different from your competitor’s. Price doesn’t count as a USP, since it’s proven that customers are always willing to pay more just to get quality products or services.

Coming up with your product’s USP is very important and should be accomplished with thorough product knowledge and research. Take time. Ask for help.

4. Use subliminal messages. Do you know that you can use subliminal messages to promote your business? Many experts say that subliminal messages don’t really work in the world of advertising. I say it’s completely not true. We have already seen how it works. You hear the words “Just do it,” and you don’t think about an inspirational phrase. You think about Nike.

It’s fundamental for businesses to have their own tagline, logo, and other marketing gimmicks that customers can associate to their products and services. Don’t forget to add them to your marketing materials too. For subliminal messages to work, the customers have to be exposed to them a lot of times.

5. Keep track of your marketing campaigns. A lot of marketing campaigns require money, and all of them demand time. It’s not a good idea to spend both on those that don’t really work. You can identify which strategies are not by monitoring your marketing campaigns.

Developing A Positioning Marketing Strategy Process

Developing a Position Marketing Strategy is determining exactly what Positioning is and why it is important. According to Wikipedia, positioning has come to mean the process by which marketers try to create an image or identity in the minds of their target markets for its product, brand, or organization. It is the relative competitive comparison that a company occupies in a given market as perceived by the target market.

Position is the customers overall perception of your business including its products and services. Position is what is in the mindset of your customer. If your positioning takes full advantage of your customers perceptions and you communicate this positioning effectively, it will set you apart from your competition and establish a solid first link in the purchase decision chain, also known as the awareness link. The awareness link shapes your relationship, and often the real purchase is made by the unconscious mind on the basis of awareness long before the actual sales transition is completed. Having good positioning makes for favorable awareness and sets you up for success right from the start.

Position can be very tricky in that its under your control yet it is not. To the extent that your customer may already have perceptions about your business, industry, products and services, those perceptions already are your positioning. You need to identify these perceptions because you can change your positioning. As a result changing customer perceptions with effective communications through your companys sensory package can influence the behavior that is consistent with the image you are trying to project to your customers.

Your positioning has to be genuine. It MUST be consistent with the reality of your business and it has to be consistent with the perceptions of your target markets or it will not be credible or believed. Positioning, based on false claims or a misunderstanding of your target markets, is a liability to your company. It can turn away prospective customers and weaken relationships with existing customers.

Differentiation is more than just simply being different from your competitor. You need to be preferentially differentiated and this is why it is important to be positioning your company in your target markets. I read many articles and blogs that constantly say being able to identify how your product or service is different is one of the factors that will make or break your business. You may ask why? It is because being different AND being able to successfully communicate that difference will secure a welcome niche in the marketplace for your business. To create a differentiation that will not be imitated, you have to think beyond your core benefits of your business. The companies that have succeeded in maintaining their differentiation over the years and werent intimated are those that innovated in qualities beyond the core benefits of their market. Be the innovator of qualities and think ahead and look outside the forest.

There is a systematic process for developing an effective positioning for your overall business. It is a step-by-step process, but it is not automatic and does not happen overnight. It requires careful thinking and insight from you from the inside of your business to position for the outside perception of your business. It requires that you know your target markets (see last weeks blog Your Target Market and the Need to Focus. It takes time, but with proper understanding of your target markets, you will have a foundation in place for building a positioning strategy that will draw your target customers to you. EXHIB-IT! has been working on our position strategy for the last few years after our competitor moved within .2 miles from our showroom where we had been located for a number of years. We took for granted that our competitor was across town and knew we differentiated our businesses and it did not hurt that we were on opposite sides of town. However, when our competitor moved this close to our location where we had been for 7 years at the time, misperception in the community occurred. Our company names are similar (as are about 500 exhibit names in the USA). We focused on position strategy, which has allowed us to grow 122% over a 2.5 year period. It was not an easy process in the beginning, but once we identified our target markets, along with our secondary flanker markets, it made it easy for us to have a position strategy.

To be effective and create a position strategy, the first step is to determine the general classification of your products and services. They can be classified into one of three ways (1) a true product, (2) a commodity or (3) a brand. Think about what you sell and which category it falls into and how that affects that way you are positioned in the minds of your prospect or customer.
Many companies confuse a solid marketing strategy with pure tactics, also known as a brand juice. Visual identity with clever tag lines and a creative “essence” advertising package through your sensory package are all key ingredients in brand juice creation, but they are only supporting elements. To be effective, such supporting elements must be part of a more comprehensive plan.
After determining your relative standing in the market and how the market sees you compared to your competitors, this will affect how you develop your marketing communications as you decide to either reinforce your current relative standing or try to change it, work on these five steps below.

1.Determine what the dominant gratification mode and purchase preference of your target market segments are. To do this, you look at the psychographic characteristics of your customer – which are the perception and behavior modes. You look at the interpersonal, objective and introverted modes and what the purchase preferences were regarding experimental, performance and value of your products and services and apply these to the way you create your positioning statement.

2.Develop other key psychographic characteristics of your target market. Study your existing customers (as this is your most cost effective approach to studying the characteristics) and look for clues to customer perceptions that will help shape your positioning strategy.

3.Redefine your product or services. Begin setting yourself apart and create a unique place in your customers minds to define your product or service in terms of its features and emotional factors that are important to your prospective customers. Then write your positioning strategy which should be a brief paragraph for each target market segment that provides an overview of your positioning by gathering all of the key positioning elements and pulling them all together.

4.Develop your unique selling proposition also known as an USP. This is your slogan, your tagline, and is an expression that will become closely linked with your business. It should be something catchy and easy to remember and should also contain a basic message about your company that elicits in your prospective customers the emotional gratification that they can expect from your business through its products and services.

5.Develop your positioning statement to be more explicit and an expanded version of your USP that explains and gives the rational justification for it by identifying what your business does, the result customers can expect from doing business with you, and how you are going to achieve that result.

Again, be sure to review this information and update it periodically to keep the information current. Your Position Strategy should be evaluated constantly by using metrics and updated periodically to keep you current with your prospects and customers needs.

What Is Buzzworthiness How Do We Create A Marketing Buzz

What pops into your mind when you hear the word buzzworthy or even just buzz?

Well for starters, when I hear the word buzz on its own, I think of bees swarming around a hive full of honey. If I think a little further I get an image of a busy New York street, a mall full of people, or even a festival/parade. These things also bring me back to the image of the bees buzzing around a hive of honey, the only difference is that they’re people, and the honey is something that attracts them there.

The honey in New York would be business opportunities, social opportunities, and entertainment. In a busy mall, it’s the stores with the products and services they offer. A festival or parade has festivities, extravagant performances, or entertainment value. All these things are what we could call buzzworthy, because they attract a crowd of buzzing bustling people excited and active.

So now let’s put these images in the frame of business and word of mouth/buzz marketing. When we’re trying to develop a viral marketing campaign, we need something buzzworthy. So let’s look for some honey that’ll get the bees swarming. Since we’re probably not selling honey to bees, we’ll need to find something that is sweet enough that will attract a swarm of buzzing excited customers for a feeding frenzy.

This is where things could get challenging though. It would seem that there are so many products and services out there, with so many marketing campaigns, that the swarms have scattered and become uninterested. They’ve headed for the honey one too many times with the thought of how sweet it will be, only to discover a bitter muck or molasses at best. This causes them to become discouraged, untrusting, and wary of the next guy who advertises honey.

Don’t let this get you down, or stop you from releasing a product. The fact that there are so many dud products out there can be your opportunity to release a good one. According to the contrast principle, those dud products can actually boost your recognition just by your ability to be so much better than the competition.

Now I can sense that some of you are probably thinking “How can I be sure my product is better than the competition?” It’s simple; just make a product that is buzzworthy, which means making your product sweet enough to attract a swarm of buzzing customers. How? Through excellence! People talk and get excited about excellence, and that is buzzworthiness. Here’s a breakdown of how to be sure your product is excellent.

– Don’t overhype your product and then underdeliver. You may get a swarm on the initial product launch, but when those buzzing bees find out that your honey is really molasses, the buzz will be silenced, and you can say goodbye to your customers, because they won’t be coming back for more. Only amateurs focus on the first sale.

– Give your customers a high return on their investment. This means deliver what you promised, at a fair price, and then overdeliver. Give them more than what they asked for. Add value to your product where-ever value can be added. Stick behind your product, give support for your product, guarantee your product or their money back, and tack on some bonuses for buying your product.

– Create a good Unique Selling Proposition (USP). Your USP is an attention grabbing phrase that addresses a few of the following: What you’re selling, how much, key benefits, &/or why buy from you. This is an important part of your product creation process and is best if it’s short, sweet, catchy, and enticing. Pay attention to the word “unique” in there, because you need to have a unique quality that makes you stand out from the rest of the crowd. You also want to make sure that your USP is believable. Most people know the old saying “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is”, and if that pops into their mind when they read your USP, then you’re sunk.

Hype your product, and then overdeliver! Excellence is buzzworthy, and if you go that extra mile for your customer, and if you exceed their expectations, then they will be excited about you and your product, and they will tell others about it.

Q) What is buzzworthiness?
A) Buzzworthiness is something that is buzzworthy.

Q) How do we judge what’s buzzworthy?
A) If it’s buzzworthy, then it will create a buzz.

Q) What defines a marketing buzz?
A) If customers are excited about a product, telling others about it, and coming back for more with a swarm behind them in a feeding frenzy.

So there you have it folks. I hope this gives you a better idea of how viral/word of mouth/buzz marketing works, and how you can create a buzz with your product/service. Just one more key to note is that you should study the concept here, then innovate, and improve upon it. Some of the biggest buzzes I’m sure are still to come, and you might just be the one to start them buzzing.