Effective marketing is about getting our products or services in front of the consumer where they will see it and be attracted to it. If we take the time to understand the way our consumers use the internet it enables us to ensure that they see it online when they are participating in their usual activities.
Take a few moments to learn how both men and women use the internet and how that information can help you in positioning your product or service and in return help you to increase your conversions. You may just find out why you are not selling any of your products or services online.Are you tired of hearing about Charlie Sheen? Last week I attended a conference and I will tell you that the name "Charlie Sheen" was mentioned way too many times, to the point the jokes got old, but we must acknowledge he has the buzz going.
There was even an online virus (malware) that was spread through Facebook using the hook that Charlie Sheen had been found dead in his home. Obviously this was a hoax, but it got people to click. When users would click the link it would take them to a fake You-Tube clone page and if you clicked on any link on that page the virus was spread throughout your Facebook friends.
What can we learn from Charlie Sheen when it comes to public relations? I mean after all what company wouldn't love the buzz that he is receiving.
As Guy explains in his recent article when professional athletes, politicians or rock stars self-destruct, people naturally pay attention to the celebrity train wreck.
Charlie Sheen's fiery wreckage certainly has caught our attention. He did things different -- he didn't go into hiding or rehab. He took control of his own publicity and media appearance. He created internet memes at will. But he didn't have a plan, or a purpose, and heavy exposure has quickly turned into overexposure and media fatigue.
But as a small business owner, you don't have time to devise complex marketing strategies for your products. Instead, you can tap into a few simple strategies that have already proven their worth.
Many small business owners mistakenly confuse marketing strategies with ad campaigns. A marketing strategy is a plan or an approach for marketing your products and services. An ad campaign, on the other hand, is the means by which your marketing strategy is accomplished. Your objective is to tie your advertising efforts into a comprehensive marketing strategy that has carefully designed to attract attention in the marketplace.
Some marketing strategies are created for the purpose of capturing a certain segment of the market, but the majority of small business strategies are more generic in nature. Even so, it's important to understand what your strategy is trying to achieve.
Boost Consumer Confidence
Consumers are fickle lot and are frequently hesitant to buy a product they know little about. If your business or products are new to the area, you could create a marketing campaign that emphasizes the quality and value of your products. The resulting boost in consumer confidence will likely translate into more action at the cash register.
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Create Awareness
Another way to spark interest for your products is to conduct a campaign designed to promote your products in as many ways as possible. In other words, your marketing strategy could be to create buzz by blanketing the local airwaves, print space, and other advertising mediums with your name, logo, and products. Increased awareness will definitely bring more people into your store, but it also costs money, so you should be prepared to increase your advertising budget to pull it off.
Leverage Emotions
No matter what they say, the buying decision is emotional for many customers. Large corporations spend millions of dollars playing on their customers' emotions and what works for them, can work for you, too. The key is to create a campaign that makes consumers feel themselves, your company, and the decision to buy your products.
Overcome Objections
The task of overcoming a buyer's objections is usually assigned to the sales team. However, a well-crafted marketing campaign can work toward overcoming your customers' buying obstacles before they walk in the door. A marketing strategy that emphasizes warranties, testimonials, endorsements, and other positive reinforcement devices can not only make the buying decision easier for existing customers, but also attract new customers who hadn't previously considered buying from your business.
Set a Deadline
Why do so many ads emphasize the date the sale ends? Because people respond to deadlines. Marketing strategies designed around the idea of limited supplies, temporary price reductions, or other mechanisms that create a sense of urgency can provide a quick influx of customers and can potentially jumpstart a business suffering from a diminished customer base.
Marketing Strategy
The marketing concept of building an organization around the profitable satisfaction of customer needs has helped firms to achieve success in high-growth, moderately competitive markets. However, to be successful in markets in which economic growth has leveled and in which there exist many competitors who follow the marketing concept, a well-developed marketing strategy is required. Such a strategy considers a portfolio of products and takes into account the anticipated moves of competitors in the market.
The Case of Barco
In late 1989, Barco N.V.'s projection systems division was faced with Sony's surprise introduction of a better graphics projector. Barco had been perceived as a leader, introducing high quality products first and targeting a niche market that was willing to pay a higher price. Being a smaller company, Barco could not compete on price, so it traditionally pursued a skimming strategy in the graphics projector market, where it had a 55% market share of the small market. Barco's overall market share for all types of projectors was only 4%.
Even though Barco's market was mainly in graphics projectors, the company had not introduced a new graphics projector in over two years. Instead, it was spending a large portion of its R&D budget on video projector products. However, video projectors were not Barco's market.
Barco's engineers had been working long hours on their new projector that would not be as good as Sony's. Some people thought they should not stop work on that product since the engineers' morale would suffer after being told how important it was to work hard to get the product out. However, even considering the morale of the product team, it would not have been a good idea to introduce a product that was inferior to that of Sony. Barco wisely stopped working on the inferior product and put a major effort in developing a projector that outperformed Sony's.
The Barco case illustrates several marketing strategy concepts:
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Price / Selling Effort Strategies: A firm that follows a skimming strategy seeks to be the first to introduce a product with very good performance, selling it to the innovator market segment and charging a premium price for it. It makes as much profit as possible, then moves on when the competition arrives. The price is likely to fall over time as competition is encountered. Such a skimming strategy contrasts with a penetrating strategy, which seeks to gain market share by sacrificing short-term profits, and increasing the price over time as market share is gained.
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Competitors have certain strengths and abilities. To succeed, a firm must leverage its own unique abilities.
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A firm should prepare defensive strategies before potential threats arrive. If the competition surprises a firm with the introduction of a vastly superior product, the firm should resist the temptation to proceed with its mediocre product. A firm never should introduce a product that is obsolete when it hits the market.
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The competition's probable response to a firm's actions should be considered carefully.
Marketing Research for Strategic Decision Making
The two most common uses of marketing research are for diagnostic analysis to understand the market and the firm's current performance, and opportunity analysis to define any unexploited opportunities for growth. Marketing research studies include consumer studies, distribution studies, semantic scaling, multidimensional scaling, intelligence studies, projections, and conjoint analysis. A few of these are outlined below.
* Semantic scaling: a very simple rating of how consumers perceive the physical attributes of a product, and what the ideal values of those attributes would be. Semantic scaling is not very accurate since the consumers are polled according to an ordinal ranking so mathematical averaging is not possible. For example, 8 is not necessarily twice as much as 4 in an ordinal ranking system. Furthermore, each person uses the scale differently.
* Multidimensional scaling (MDS) addresses the problems associated with semantic scaling by polling the consumer for pair-wise comparisons between products or between one product and the ideal. The assumption is that while people cannot report reliably which attributes drive their choices, they can report perceptions of similarities between brands. However, MDS analyses do not indicate the relative importance between attributes.
* Conjoint analysis infers the relative importance of attributes by presenting consumers with a set of features of two hypothetical products and asking them which product they prefer. This question is repeated over several sets of attribute values. The results allow one to predict which attributes are the more important, the combination of attribute values that is the most preferred. From this information, the expected market share of a given design can be estimated.
Multi-Product Resource Allocation
The most common resource allocation methods are:
* Percentage of sales
* Executive judgement
* All-you-can-afford
* Match competitors
* Last year based
Another method is called decision calculus. Managers are asked four questions:
What would sales be with:
1. no sales force
2. half the current effort
3. 50% greater effort
4. a saturation level of effort.
From these answers, one can determine the parameters of the S-curve response function and use linear programming techniques to determine resource allocations.
Decision algorithms that result in extreme solutions, such as allocating most of the sales force to one product while neglecting another product often do not yield practical solutions.
For mature products, sales increase very little as a function of advertising expenditures. For newer products however, there is a very positive correlation.
Portfolio models may be used to allocate resources among major product lines or business units. The BCG growth-share matrix is one such model.
New Product Diffusion Curve
As a new product diffuses into the market, some types of consumers such as innovators and early adopters buy the product before other consumers. The product adoption follows a trajectory that is shaped like a bell curve and is known as the product diffusion curve. The marketing strategy should take this adoption curve into account and address factors that influence the rate of adoption by the different types of consumers.
Dynamic Product Management Strategies
Two fundamental issues of product management are whether to pioneer or follow, and how to manage the product over its life cycle.
Order of market entry is very important. In fact, the forecasted market share relative to the pioneering brand is the pioneering brand's share divided by the square root of the order of entry. For example, the brand that entered third is forecasted to have 1/√3 times the market share of the first entrant (Marketing Science, Vol. 14, No. 3, Part 2 of 2, 1995.) This rule was determined empirically.
The pioneering advantage is obtained from both the supply and demand side. From the supply side, there are raw material advantages, better experience effects to provide a cost advantage, and channel preemption. On the demand side, there is the advantage of familiarity, the chance to set a standard, and the choice of perceptual position.
Once a firm gains a pioneering advantage, it can maintain it by improving the product, creating a standard, advertise that it was the first, and introduce a new product in the market that may cannibalize the first but deter other firms from entering.
There also are disadvantages to being the pioneer. Being first allows a competitor to leapfrog the early technology. The incumbent develops inertia in its R&D and may not be a flexible as newcomers. Developing an industry has costs that the pioneer must bear alone, and the way the industry develops and its potential size are not deterministic.
In general, products are clustered in the low-low or high-high categories. If a product is in a mixed category, after introduction it will tend to move to the low-low or high-high one.
Increasing the breadth of the product line as several advantages. A firm can better serve multiple segments, it can occupy more of the distributors' shelf space, it offers customers a more complete selection, and it preempts competition. While a wider range of products will cause a firm to cannibalize some of its own sales, it is better to do so oneself rather than let the competition do so.
The drawbacks of broad product lines are reduced volume for each brand (cannibalization), greater manufacturing complexity, increased inventory, more management resources required, more advertising (or less per brand), clutter and confusion in advertising for both customers and distributors.
To increase profits from existing brands, a firm can improve its production efficiency, increase the demand through more users, more uses, and more usage. A firm also can defend its existing base through line extensions (expand on a current brand), flanker brands (new brands in an existing product area), and brand extensions.
Ready to transform your business, your profits and your life? The simple answer is that you can. No matter what you sell, there are thousands of potential buyers looking to spend money with you.
The first step is to stop using old school, outdated marketing tactics that actually do more harm than good. And then to apply the simple strategies that lead to success over and over.
Discover the new rules for profiting in this economy to attract more clients and boost sales. Start with the hundreds of free marketing ideas here and when you're ready to get serious use one of the proven marketing systems below to put your business growth on autopilot.
Developing Your Product
Your first step will be to develop a great product. You're probably thinking that's easier said than done, but it's really not. The absolute best product is one that you can develop yourself and deliver over the Internet. With today's technology, there is absolutely no reason why you can't create your own product. The knowledge you have within your own mind is extremely valuable. Everybody is good at something, has a special talent or some specialized knowledge. Use this knowledge to create a product.
The key to developing a great product is exclusiveness. Your product should be unique and not be in competition with hundreds of other similar products. You must give your potential customers exactly what they want. Develop a high-quality product that fills a void to increase your chance of success.
Another consideration of great importance is your target market. Keep in mind, the Internet is a global marketplace. Develop a product with a large geographic target and a wide appeal. A great product will fulfill a need or desire and provide instant gratification.
Before you develop your product, do some research -- find out exactly what people want and develop your product accordingly.
The most important consideration when developing your product is quality. Your product should not only deliver what you promise, but should go above and beyond the expected and overdeliver. Your customers satisfaction is of the utmost importance.
business plans and marketing strategy
free business planning and marketing tips, samples, examples and tools - how to write a business plan, techniques for writing a marketing strategy, strategic business plans and sales plans
Writing business plans and marketing strategy can be simple.
See the free business plan and marketing plan sample/template.
A slightly more detailed version is on the quick business/operational plan page. Business planning might appear very complex but in essence it's common sense, and begins with some very simple business start-up principles.
To explore personal direction and change (for example for early planning of self-employment or new business start-up) see the passion-to-profit exercise and template on the teambuilding exercises page.
Planning a new business or business project must at some stage address a few financial details, and challenges and opportunities relating to modern technology, the internet, websites, etc.
However the techniques of how to write strategic business plans (or a strategic marketing plan) remain basically straight-forward.
Business planning and marketing strategy are mostly common-sense and logic, based on cause and effect.
Here are tips, examples, techniques, tools and a process for writing a marketing strategy, business and sales plans, to produce effective results. This free online guide explains how to put together a marketing strategy, basic business plan, and a sales plan, including free templates and examples, such as the Ansoff and Boston matrix tools. New pages are being added soon on advertising, sales promotion, PR (public relations) and press releases, sales enquiry lead generation, advertising copy-writing, internet and website marketing, in the meanwhile see the marketing tips page for free marketing and advertising techniques and advice.
See also the simple notes about starting your own business, which to an extent also apply when you are starting a new business initiative or development inside another organisation as a new business development manager, or a similar role.
Here's a free profit and loss account spreadsheet template tool (xls) for incorporating these factors and financials into a more formal phased business trading plan, which also serves as a business forecasting and reporting tool too.
Adapt it to suit your purposes. This plan example is also available as a PDF, see the Profit and Loss Account (P&L) Small Enterprise Business Plan Example (PDF). The numbers could be anything: ten times less, ten times more, a hundred times more - the principle is the same.
Towards the end of this article there is also a simple template/framework for a feasibility study or justification report, such as might be required to win funding, authorisation or approval for starting a project, or the continuation of a project or group, in a commercial or voluntary situation.