What does your Marketing say about your company? Marketing is used to increase or create awareness of your product or company, but just randomly throwing your name out into the world doesn’t necessarily produce the results you want. Instead, what marketing should accomplish is telling the story of your company, or of the product you’re selling in a manner that increases awareness, instills confidence, and creates a higher perceived value that gives the customer a benefit.
First, pick the story you want to tell. Do you think Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream is really made by two guys on a farm in Vermont? Do you really think California Cheese comes from Happy Cows? Those are california business mailing list the stories created by a marketing department to convey the image of the product in the consumer’s mind. What story do you want to tell about your company? Different product lines can have different stories, so long as the central theme and image of the brand is consistent.
Next, decide how to reach your audience and through what method. Direct response marketing via television, direct mail and the internet are always good choices because it is simple to measure results and adjust campaigns. Once the decision is made on how to reach the audience, time, thought and effort needs to go into a marketing plan. A marketing plan should look at the full year, with efforts broken down by month, and include daily marketing habits. In the plan, outline the goal and objective of each step of the marketing.
When you research the marketing method, create an outline of your ideal customer. This means using surveys, database mining, and clearly defining who purchases your product. It’s recommended to be as specific as possible when making the ideal customer profile. If your target market is women, try to segment out by age range, by social status, by marriage, children, income and whatever other defining factors that create your ideal customer. This information comes from the people who have purchased your product before. Then define your target market by that information.
Once you pick your demographic, it’s easy to know how to reach them. The method is determined by your market. If you pick C-level executives earning more than six figures who are frequent business travelers, you can get a mailing list to the magazines those types subscribe to, or advertise in the places where they gather. This creates a highly defined target audience that allows you to craft your story around in an effort to better connect and sell the product.
A tip that often goes ignored or unheeded is to create a daily marketing calendar and stick to it. Successful companies are doing one, three even ten things every single day to promote and market their story to the consumer. It can be in the form of a press release, article, blog comments, or creating an ad campaign to reach a larger audience. But do something every day.
A Trick to make your marketing effort ten times more successful is to think like an infomercial no matter what you do. The consumer does not care about your features. Bells and whistles are not important to the average person. Focus on the benefit and include it in your marketing always. Don’t even list the feature, just talk about the benefits. After all, the reason most marketing works is because people trust the product to deliver the benefit.
