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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014
Master the latest marketing tools and trends Marketing strategies are evolving faster than ever before, andmastering the latest and greatest strategies are essential togetting results. This updated edition of the classic marketingbestseller includes new and revised material, with full coverage ofthe latest marketing trends and how to effectively apply them toyour business. Whether it's boosting your baseline marketingskills, figuring out social media, developing a comprehensiveInternet marketing strategy, or getting expert tips on effectivelocal marketing techniques, Marketing For Dummies, 4thEdition has everything you need in one easy-to-use andaccessible guide. Effective marketing is about knowing your customers and givingthem what they want, when they want it. The latest marketingresearch tells us that every customer interaction is an opportunityto grow your business and your bottom line, which is why you need aresults-oriented marketing plan. With this updated, practical, andsavvy guide to marketing strategies that work, you can apply theskills you already have more efficiently than ever beforeMarketing For Dummies, 4th Edition gives you the structureand practical advice you need to get the most out of everymarketing initiative and, ultimately, grow your business. * Maximize the lifetime value of your customers * Connect web marketing strategies to real world traffic andsales * Implement local sourcing to boost local and regional marketinginitiatives * Focus your online marketing strategy to target only qualifiedbuyers Before you waste any more time with ineffective and potentiallycostly marketing missteps, let Marketing For Dummies, 4thEdition establish viable marketing strategies that will helpyour business succeed.
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Marketing For Dummies®, 4th Edition
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Published simultaneously in Canada
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2013957976
ISBN 978-1-118-88080-7 (pbk); ISBN 978-1-118-88090-6 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-88065-4 (ebk)
Manufactured in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Marketing For Dummies
Visit www.dummies.com/cheatsheet/marketing to view this book's cheat sheet.
Table of Contents
Introduction
About This Book
Foolish Assumptions
Icons Used in This Book
Beyond the Book
Where to Go from Here
Part I: Getting Started with Marketing
Chapter 1: Optimizing Your Marketing Program
Know Yourself, Know Your Customer
Asking the right question
Filling the awareness gap
Focusing on your target customer
Identifying and playing up your strengths
Discovering the best way to find customers
Finding Your Marketing Formula
Analyzing your Five Ps
Refining your list of possibilities
Avoiding the pricing trap
Controlling Your Marketing Program
Refining Your Marketing Expectations
Projecting improvements above base sales
Preparing for (ultimately successful) failures
Revealing More Ways to Maximize Your Marketing Impact
Chapter 2: Strengthening Your Marketing Strategy
Finding and Riding a Growth Wave
Measuring the growth rate of your market
Responding to a flat or shrinking market
Growing with a Market Expansion Strategy
Offering more products
Riding a bestseller to the top
Specializing with a Market Segmentation Strategy
Gauging whether specializing is a good move
Adding a segment to expand your market
Developing a Market Share Strategy
Choosing a unit
Estimating market share
Understanding where your product fits in the market
Knowing your competitors
Studying market trends and revising if need be
Designing a Positioning Strategy
Envisioning your position: An exercise in observation and creativity
Writing a positioning strategy: The how-to
Considering Other Core Strategies
Simplicity marketing
Quality strategies
Reminder strategies
Innovative distribution strategies
Selling Innovative Products
Writing Down and Regularly Reviewing Your Strategy
Chapter 3: Writing a Marketing Plan
Grasping the Value of the Marketing Plan
Reviewing the Contents of a Good Plan
Starting with baby steps
Maximizing efficiencies
Understanding the Do’s and Don’ts of Planning
Don’t ignore the details
Don’t imitate the competitors
Do find your own formulas for success
Don’t feel confined by last period’s budget and plan
Don’t engage in unnecessary spending
Do break down your plan into simple subplans
Writing a Powerful Executive Summary
Preparing a Situation Analysis
Knowing what to include in your analysis
Being prepared for economic cycles
Taking stock with a competitor analysis table
Explaining your marketing strategy
Clarifying and Quantifying Your Objectives
Think about the limitations in your resources
Don’t expect to make huge changes in customer behavior
Summarizing Your Marketing Program
Exploring Your Program’s Details
Managing Your Marketing Program
Projecting Expenses and Revenues
Buildup forecasts
Indicator forecasts
Multiple scenario forecasts
Time-period forecasts
Creating Your Controls
Part II: Leveraging Your Marketing Skills
Chapter 4: Researching Your Customers, Competitors, and Industry
Knowing When and Why to Do Research
Researching to find better ideas
Researching to make better decisions
Researching to understand love and hate
Asking Really Good Questions
Paying Wisely for Market Research
Researching the Low-Cost (Or Free!) Way
Observing your customers
Asking customers questions
Posing your questions
Considering some sample questions
Comparing your approach to that of your competitors
Creating a customer profile
Entertaining customers to get their input
Using e-mail to do one-question surveys
Surfing government databases
Establishing a trend report
Analyzing competitors’ collateral
Researching your strengths
Probing your customer records
Testing your marketing materials
Interviewing defectors
Asking kids about trends
Creating custom web analytics
Riding a Rising Tide with Demographics
Chapter 5: Engaging Your Marketing Imagination
Turning the Tide with Creativity
Conducting a creativity audit
Changing (almost) everything
Applying Your Creativity
Writing a creative brief
Including creativity in product development
Considering creativity and brand presentation
Generating Rich Ideas
Coming up with new ideas from simple activities
Making creativity a group activity
Managing the Creative Process
Tapping Highly Creative Contributors
Are you really a creative genius?
How do you tap into those crazy creatives when you need them?
Chapter 6: Pumping Up Your Marketing Communications
Pursuing Your Communication Priorities
Achieving high frequency without sacrificing quality
Being clear
Being consistent
Adding stopping power to catch the customer’s eye
Being as persuasive as possible
Checking the accuracy of your communications
Communicating to the Entire Brain
Exploring Four Strategies for Boosting Your Communications’ Appeal
Pull Power: Building Customer Traffic
Tightening Your Writing
Creating Great Visuals
Embracing hierarchy in design
Relying on experience to avoid homemade design disaster
Part III: Advertising for Fun and Profit
Chapter 7: Perfecting Your Printed Materials
Designing Printed Marketing Materials
Including the eight necessary parts
Putting the parts together: Design and layout
Going with a professional designer
Crowdsourcing designers through contests
Doing the design on your own
Finding your font
Bringing it all together in a perfect flow
Producing Quality, Effective Brochures
Knowing the purpose of your brochure
Laying out and producing your print brochure
Publishing an e-brochure
Placing a Print Ad
Determining whether you can afford an ad
Finding inexpensive places to advertise
Selecting the ad size
Testing and improving your print ad
Chapter 8: Signing On to Outdoor Advertising
Heading Back to Basics: The Essential Sign
Knowing what your sign can do
Finding reputable sign producers
Writing good signs
Researching the regulatory constraints before posting a sign
Going Big: Posters and Billboards
Deciding on formats for outdoor ads
Grasping the limitations of outdoor ads
Maximizing the returns on outdoor advertising
Exploring the (Rather Creepy) World of Intelligent Locational Ads
Putting Your Name on Portable Items
Trying your hand at T-shirts
Getting slapped on with bumper stickers
Putting your name on bags
Staying dry (or shaded) with umbrellas
Taking Your Message to the Streets
Leveraging your vehicle fleet
Flagging down your customers
Capturing attention with canopies and awnings
Eyeing different alternatives
Keeping Your Message on the Move with Transit Advertising
Chapter 9: Broadcasting Your Message
Producing Ads for Radio
Recognizing the cost value of radio time
Going the direct route with your goals
Targeting your radio advertising
Looking into audio podcasts
Considering web radio
Identifying Less Expensive Ways to Use the Power of Video
Planning your video shoot
Shooting your own high-quality video
Designing Ads for TV and YouTube
Proceeding with TV ads
Getting emotional
Being visual: Show, show, show
Answering the question of style
Purchasing ad time on TV
Buying spot television and web video ads on a shoestring budget
Using vlogs in place of TV ads
Part IV: Finding Powerful Alternatives to Advertising
Chapter 10: Maximizing Your Web Marketing
Creating and Managing a Web Identity
Standardizing your web identity
Using the top inch to advantage
Registering domain names
Developing Your Hub Website
Designing a hub website on the cheap
Using responsive design for mobile devises
Hiring a professional designer or firm
Looking at the core elements of a good hub site
Fashioning a registration-based site
Following Simple Rules for Higher Traffic
Driving traffic with content
Reaching your traffic tipping point
Adding Satellites around Your Hub Site to Draw Visitors
Using landing pages effectively
Building relationships by blogging
Getting active on social networking sites
How to Advertise on the Web
Starting with pay-per-click search ads
Adding banner ads to your repertoire
Furthering your web campaign with creative display ads
Knowing How Much to Budget
Understanding E-Mail Etiquette
Sending appropriate individual e-mails
Going over the guidelines for mass e-mails
Chapter 11: Making a Positive Impression in Low-Cost Ways
Making the Most of Word of Mouth
Engaging with customers and followers on social media
Managing word of mouth
Capturing the power of viral marketing
Using Publicity to Your Advantage
Sniffing out good stories
Finding the hook: Think like a journalist
Communicating a story to the media
Sending press releases to website editors and (especially) bloggers
Considering the hodgepodge of video releases and wire services
Going directly to readers with a blog
Premiums: The Most Abused and Misused Medium of All!
Creating an impact with your premiums
Prizing premium quality over quantity
Chapter 12: Leveraging Face-to-Face Marketing Opportunities
Harnessing the Power of Face-to-Face Marketing
Considering your options
Avoiding boredom to ensure interesting events
Sponsoring a Special Event
Know your options
Run the numbers
Screen for relevance
Express your values and convictions
Putting On Your Own Public Event
Selling sponsorship rights
Getting help managing your event
Expanding the event online
Exhibiting at Trade Shows and Exhibitions
Knowing what trade shows can accomplish for you
Building the foundations for a good booth
Locating trade shows
Renting the perfect booth
Setting up other kinds of displays
Doing trade shows on a dime
Passing out premiums
Chapter 13: Going Direct with Your Marketing
Beating the Odds with Direct Marketing
Recognizing that practice makes perfect
Knowing what you’re up against
Focusing on tactics that create high response rates
Maximizing direct response on the web
Expanding your command with demand side platforms
Making Your Direct-Response Ads Work
Delivering Direct Mail
Unlocking the secrets of great direct mail
Getting your letter mailed
Purchasing mailing lists
Establishing and Running a Call Center
Make your brand available by phone
Be accessible to desirable customers when they want to call you
Capture useful information about each call and caller
Gather data on the effectiveness of direct-response ads and direct mail
Drumming Up Business by Phone
Developing a good call list
Writing a winning telemarketing script
Keeping legal
Looking at new telemarketing strategies
Part V: Selling Great Products to Anyone, Anytime, Anywhere
Chapter 14: Making Your Brand Stand Out
Burning Your Brand into Your Customers’ Minds
Getting tough about your brand identity
Narrowing logo options down to one strong design
Focusing on your website
Branding throughout your “herd”
Coming Up with a Brand Name
Naming your brand with personality
Identifying your brand’s personality traits
Giving a memorable and meaningful name
Designing a Product Line
Eyeing depth and breadth
Managing your product line effectively
Protecting your product line and brand
Strengthening an Existing Product
Identifying When and How to Introduce a New Product
Making the old new again
Stealing — er, borrowing — ideas
Picking your customers’ brains
Using the significant difference strategy
When to Upgrade an Existing Product
Passing the differentiation test
Passing the champion test
Chapter 15: Finding the Right Pricing Approach
Eyeing Pricing Opportunities and Constraints
Raising your price and selling more
Avoiding underpricing
Exploring the impact of pricing on customers’ purchases
Finding profits without raising prices
Setting or Changing Your List Price
Step 1: Figure out who sets prices
Step 2: Examine your costs
Step 3: Evaluate customers’ price preferences
Step 4: Consider secondary influences on price
Step 5: Set your strategic objectives
Step 6: Master the psychology of prices
Designing Special Offers
Creating coupons and other discounts
Figuring out how much to offer
Forecasting redemption rates
Predicting the cost of special offers
Keeping special offers special
Staying Out of Trouble with the Law
Staying ahead of U.S. regulations
Watching out for tighter rules elsewhere
Chapter 16: Distributing Your Product Where Your Customers Are
Taking a Strategic Approach
Tracking Down Ideal Distributors
Understanding Channel Structure
Reviewing Retail Strategies and Tactics
Looking for heavy traffic
Developing merchandising strategies
Creating atmosphere
Positioning your store on price
Stimulating Sales at Point of Purchase
Chapter 17: Succeeding in Sales and Service
Knowing When to Emphasize Personal Selling
Taking Stock of Your Sales Skills
Making the Sale
Generating sales leads
Purchasing lists for lead generation
Conducting multistep lead generation
Developing great sales presentations and consultations
Responding to problems
Organizing Your Sales Force
Determining how many salespeople you need
Hiring your own or using reps
Compensating Your Sales Force
Retaining Customers through Great Service
Measuring the quality of customer service
Profiting from good manners
Offering virtual service and a helpful knowledge base
Practicing service recovery
Using content to court customers
Part VI: The Part of Tens
Chapter 18: Ten Common Marketing Mistakes (And How to Avoid Them)
Buying into Too-Good-to-Be-True Website Claims
Scamming, Social Media Style
Selling to the Wrong People
Competing on Price
Forgetting to Edit
Not Emphasizing the Brand
Offering What You Can’t Deliver
Treating Customers Impersonally
Blaming the Customer
Avoiding Upset Customers
Chapter 19: Ten Tips for Boosting Web Sales
Take Well-Lit Product Photos
Choose the Right Backdrop
Include Info for Comparative Shoppers
Add Streaming Video
Provide Prompt E-Mail Support
Supply a “Contact Me Now” Option
Design a Clean, Uncluttered Site
Offer Straightforward Site Navigation
Build an Appealing, Trustworthy Brand
Put Your Web Address Everywhere
About the Author
Cheat Sheet
More Dummies Products
Guide
Table of Contents
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Introduction
Marketing is part science, part art, and it can be challenging to bottle up both parts into a winning campaign. Your business (or nonprofit or service agency) needs to communicate what it does clearly and well; present a positive, compelling brand identity; focus its resources where they’ll do the most good; grow its market share by attracting and retaining good customers or clients; and migrate to new media, techniques, and technologies as soon as your customers are ready to move along with you.
Since I researched and wrote the first edition of Marketing For Dummies, the field of marketing has fragmented into ever more narrow specialties. Now you can find entire books on how to market on Pinterest or Facebook. The poor marketer gets the impression that he must be incredibly clever, technically skilled, and able to whip up web page designs in the morning, code crafty meta tags over coffee break, attract a frenzy of social media followers before lunch, and then present the marketing plan complete with budget and sales projections to the board of directors in the afternoon.
Marketing is best approached as a more hands-off endeavor, in which the marketing manager or planner thoughtfully selects services and people to implement a sound plan. I challenge you to do a little reading and a little thinking before you allow yourself to get caught up in some complex and wearying new technical challenge.
Every business needs marketing imagination — creative thinking from a marketing perspective, such as reviewing strategic options and considering new product ideas, new distribution channels, new pricing or packaging, or interesting ways to communicate the benefits. It’s like the trip planner or navigator who considers the road ahead and chooses the best way to go based on the terrain and conditions. You wouldn’t head off on a trip without an itinerary and a GPS or map at the very least. Don’t leave home without reading up on marketing plans and programs, at least enough to be able to engage your marketing imagination.
This book will help if you really have to roll up your sleeves and do some fundamentals yourself, but it will also help you think more big-picture by identifying smart ways for getting the job done rather than stretching yourself ever more thinly over ever more varied technical details.
About This Book
I wrote this book with a variety of marketers in mind, including small business owners and entrepreneurs who wear the marketing and sales hats and several other hats. I also wrote for managers and staffers of larger organizations who work on plans, programs, product launches, ad campaigns, printed materials, websites, and other elements but who lack a macro-level reference to help them think about and integrate all the varied elements of good marketing. And I didn’t forget about political campaign managers, public health educators, directors and board members, museums, nonprofits, and the army of independent consultants, who must not only be experts in their own field but also promote their personal brands to guarantee a steady flow of clients.
Ultimately, every marketer can benefit from trying to smarten his approach, embracing new strategies and media, and seeking ways to increase impact while reducing costs. Those are my goals as an author, too.
Before diving into the pages that follow, I want you to be aware of a few specific terms I use throughout this book:
Marketing program: This phrase refers to any organized, coordinated use of sales, advertising, publicity, customer service, the web, direct mail, or any other efforts to contact and influence customers. Creating a marketing program means avoiding random or disconnected activities. It also means thinking about how everything interlinks and contributes to achieving your marketing goals.Customer: The customer is whoever buys what you sell — whether a person, a household, a business, a government agency, a school, or even a voter — the rules of sound marketing always apply.Product: This is whatever you sell or offer to customers. Your product can be animate or inanimate, tangible or intangible. Even if you offer a service or a person (such as a political candidate or a celebrity), that’s considered a product in marketing jargon.Sales: I treat person-to-person sales as one of the many possible activities under the marketing umbrella. You need to integrate selling into the broader range of activities designed to bring about sales and satisfy customers. I address ways of managing sales better in my overall efforts to make each of your marketing activities more effective.Foolish Assumptions
I assume that you’re intelligent, which is great because you need to be clever, caring, and persistent to do marketing well. But I don’t assume that you have all the technical knowledge you need to do great marketing, so I explain each technique as clearly as I can. I also assume that you’re willing to try new ideas to improve sales and grow your organization. After all, marketing requires an open mind and a willingness to experiment.
I assume that you don’t mind calling or e-mailing people to ask whether they can help. Marketers often employ outside services, and it’s important to build a long list of service providers and get good at selecting, managing, and, if need be, replacing them. To this end, I contribute hundreds of names and websites that may be helpful leads for you.
Of course, I also assume that you’re willing and able to switch from being imaginative and creative one moment to being analytical and rigorous the next, because being successful at marketing requires both approaches. Sometimes, I ask you to run the numbers and do sales projections. Other times, I ask you to dream up a clever way to catch a reader’s eye and communicate a benefit to that person. These demands pull you in opposite directions. If you can assemble a team of varied people, some of them numbers-oriented and some artistic, you can cover all the marketing bases more easily. But if you have a small business, you may be all you have, so you need to wear each hat in turn. (At least you never get bored tackling marketing’s varied challenges!)
I certainly do not assume that you have an unlimited budget. Most marketers are eager to find low-cost marketing methods, so I emphasize economical approaches throughout this book.
In fact, I believe that the best marketing is, paradoxically, no marketing. It’s not likely that you’ll achieve that romanticized goal, but imagine for a moment that your brand is so well respected, your product or service so excellent, and your customers so loyal that all your business comes from repeat sales and word of mouth, and the media, social media, and blog reviewers give you all the public exposure you need, without ever having to buy a single ad. Pretty good, huh? Although you may never drive your budget to zero, you may be able to improve results while reducing costs. More impact, more focus, and more loyalty all add up to better results at lower cost. Think about it: A world with 100 percent efficient marketing is a world virtually without advertising. Ahh. The sound of silence …
Icons Used in This Book
Look for these symbols to help you find valuable info throughout the text:
All marketing is real-world marketing, but this icon means you can find an actual example of something that worked (or didn’t work) in the real world for another marketer.
When I want to get you up to speed on essential or critical information you need to know to succeed, I mark it with this icon.
This icon flags specific advice you can try out in your marketing program right away. And because sometimes you need the right perspective on a problem to reach success, this icon also points out suggestions on how to handle the task at hand in an easy manner.
You can easily run into trouble in marketing because so many mines are just waiting for you to step on them. I’ve marked them all with this symbol.
Beyond the Book
In addition to the great content in the book or e-book you’re reading right now, you can find more marketing tips and suggestions at www.dummies.com/cheatsheet/marketing. And be sure to check out the articles (well, really more like blogs) at www.dummies.com/extras/marketing. These, plus the numerous narrow-topic books on marketing in the For Dummies line, give you lots of additional options for researching your marketing program.
Where to Go from Here
If you read only one chapter in one business book this year, make it Chapter 1 of this book. I made this chapter stand alone as a powerful way to audit your marketing and upgrade or enhance the things you do to make profitable sales. I packed the rest of the book with good tips and techniques, and it all deserves attention. But whatever else you do or don’t get around to, read the first chapter with a pen and action list at hand!
Perhaps you have a pressing need in one of the more specific areas covered in this book. If fixing your website is the top item on your to-do list, go to Chapter 10 first. If you need to increase the effectiveness of your sales force, try Chapter 17. Working on a letter to customers? Then Chapters 6 and 13 on marketing communications and direct mail can really help you out. Whatever you’re doing, I have a hunch that this book has a chapter or two to assist you. So don’t let me slow you down. Get going! It’s never too early (or too late) to do a little marketing.
Part I
Getting Started with Marketing
Visit www.dummies.com to learn more and do more with For Dummies.
In this part …
Discover how to coordinate your sales and marketing activities in an effective marketing program that optimizes your spending and allows you to track results across numerous media formats, including traditional advertising, the web, and hand-held devices.Position your brand, products, services, or self to maximize impact and differentiate from the competition. Select the marketing strategy that fits your scale and current position to generate realistic growth.Create a simple yet sufficiently detailed marketing plan to help you track progress, note areas of success, and eliminate unprofitable activities.Make constructive changes by shifting your effort and spending away from low-growth or shrinking market segments and seeking waves of growth to ride to higher levels of sales.Create clear, simple statements of your strategies and tactics to share with your marketing team, from graphic designers and media buyers to sales representatives, distributors, or other marketing partners.Chapter 1
Optimizing Your Marketing Program
In This Chapter
Succeeding by understanding your customers — and yourself
Formulating a winning marketing strategy
Leveraging your marketing program with focus and control
Figuring out what to realistically expect from your program
Maximizing the appeal of your product, service, or business
Marketing is all the activities that contribute to building ongoing, profitable relationships with customers to grow your business. The traditional goal of marketing is to bring about healthy sales through advertising, brand development, and other activities. A more long-term goal is to become increasingly useful or valuable to a growing number of customers so as to ensure your future success. Watch both short-term sales and long-term development of value to make your organization a growing success.
Your marketing program is the right mix of products or services, pricing, promotions, branding, sales, and distribution that will produce immediate sales and also help you grow over time. You’ll know when you’ve found the right mix for you and your organization because it will produce profitable sales and enough demand to allow you to grow at a comfortable rate.
This chapter serves as a jumping-off point into the world of marketing. By reading it, you can begin to design a marketing program that works for you. The rest of this book can help you refine the program that meets your needs.
Know Yourself, Know Your Customer
To make your marketing program more profitable and growth oriented, think about how to reach and persuade more of the right customers. When you understand how your customers think and what they like, you may find better ways to make more sales. The next sections help you get better acquainted with what you have to offer and start communicating those offerings to your customers.
Asking the right question
Traditional marketers ask just one key question:
What do we need to tell customers to make the sale?
Then they flood the environments (both virtual and actual) with competing claims, trying to outdo each other in their efforts to prove that they have what customers want. This barrage of noisy advertising and one-up salesmanship is inefficient, wasteful, and, to many, an unfortunate source of social pollution.
A better initial question to ask is this:
What do I/we have uniquely to offer?
When you start right off by examining yourself in the mirror and identifying your genuine, honest-to-yourself strength(s), you’re many laps ahead of most marketers, whether you’re selling something as simple as your résumé, as complex as a new high-tech product, or anything in between. Your unique strengths form the core of your offering, and you should keep building your strengths in ways that are true to your identity.
Whether you’re marketing yourself (perhaps you’re a consultant or someone else who offers individualized services) or a business entity of some kind, you can’t make consistent and efficient headway by deceiving yourself and trying to deceive others. The more true to your core the marketing message is, the more effective it is. If you can’t find any unique qualities to advertise, postpone those media purchases and work on self-improvement or product development. (Perhaps you simply need to listen harder to what your customers say and make sure they’re so happy that they recruit new customers!) Then come back to your program with a stronger set of claims that any customer can clearly see are of benefit — that is, unique benefit, not just a run-of-the-mill, everybody-does-it-that-way benefit.
If you draw a large enough circle around your market, you’ll probably encompass competitors who are better than you. There are so many people out there, working hard and innovating, just like you! So as you work to improve your offerings and become ever more unique and special, draw that circle appropriately. It’s the equivalent of your bar, so don’t set it too high. Perhaps you should try to be the best distributor of alternative, organic, and local foods in just one city. After you have that city sewed up, expand to the next closest market. Don’t, however, try to advertise and distribute across a ten-state area right out of the starting blocks. Knowing yourself means knowing your limitations as well as your strengths.
Marketing programs communicate benefits. Benefits are the qualities that your customers value. For example, your product may offer benefits such as convenience, ease of use, brand appeal, attractive design, local sourcing, healthiness, or a lower price than the competition. A service business, or an individual who provides services like consulting, may list benefits such as expertise, friendliness, and availability. The right mix of benefits can make your product or service particularly appealing to the group of customers who value those benefits. Make your list now: What are your core benefits, things that you can honestly say you’re good at and that customers may value?
Even if you’re better from a logical or rational perspective, customers may still choose the competition. Say your new cola scores better in blind taste tests or is made of organic ingredients. So what? Who wants to buy an unknown cola rather than the brand they know and love? No, this trust issue isn’t rational, but it still affects the purchase — which is why you absolutely must take a look at the emotional reasons people may or may not buy from you. Is your brand appealing? Do you use an attractive design for your packaging? Is your presentation professional and trustworthy? Do people know you or your business and look upon you favorably? Positive image isn’t hard to build for free when you market locally or regionally; you just need to show up consistently in ways that demonstrate your concern for the community.
Image isn’t everything in marketing, but it is just about everything when it comes to the emotional impact you make. So pay close attention to your image when you’re looking for ways to boost sales. To truly know your customers, you also need to explore the answers to these two questions:
What do customers think about my product? Do they understand it? Do they think its features and benefits are superior to the competition and can meet their needs? Do they feel that my product is a good value given its benefits and costs? Is it easy for them to buy the product when and where they need it?How do customers feel about my product? Does it make them feel good? Do they like its personality? Do they like how it makes them feel about themselves? Do they trust me?To answer these questions, find something to write on and draw a big T to create two columns. Label the left column “What Customers Know About,” and put the name of your brand, company, or product in the blank. Label the right column “How Customers Feel About,” and fill in as much as you can from your own knowledge before asking others to give you more ideas. Keep working on this table until you’re sure you have an exhaustive list of both the logical thoughts and facts and the emotional feelings and impressions that customers have.
If you have access to a friendly group of customers or prospective customers, tell them you’re holding an informal focus group with complimentary drinks and snacks (doing so helps with your recruiting) and ask them to help you understand your marketing needs by reviewing and commenting on your table. The goal is to see whether your lists of what customers know and feel about your product agree with theirs. Do they concur with how you described their emotional viewpoint and/or their factual knowledge base? (Chapter 4 gives more information about researching customer attitudes.)
Filling the awareness gap
Are prospective customers even aware that you exist? If not, then you need to bump up your marketing communications and get in front of them somehow to reduce or eliminate the awareness gap, which is the percentage of people in your target market who are unaware of your offerings and their benefits. (How? That’s what the rest of this book is about, so keep reading!) If only one in ten prospective customers knows about your brand, then you have a 90 percent awareness gap and need to get the word out to a lot more people.
If you need to communicate with customers more effectively and often, you have some options for bumping up the impact of your marketing communications and reducing the awareness gap:
You can put in more time. For example, if customers lack knowledge about your product, more sales calls can help fill this awareness gap.You can spend more money. More advertisements help fill your awareness gap, but of course, they cost money.You can communicate better. A strong, focused marketing program with clear, consistent, and frequent communications helps fill the awareness gap with information and a positive brand image, which then allows interest and purchase levels to rise significantly. See Figure 1-1 for a graphic that illustrates the awareness gap, and consider creating your own graph in the same format to see how big your awareness gap is. (Communicating better is my favorite approach, because it substitutes to some degree for time and money.)You can become more popular. Sometimes you can create a buzz of talk about your product. If people think it’s really cool or exciting, they may do some of the communicating for you, spreading the news by word of mouth and via social media (this is sometimes referred to as viral marketing). If your customers are active on any social media, then you need to be, too.© John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Figure 1-1: How to graph and analyze your awareness gap.
Focusing on your target customer
Your target customer is the person for whom you design your product and marketing program. If you don’t already have a clear profile of your target customer, make one now; otherwise, your marketing program will be adrift in a sea of less-than-effective options.
To craft your target customer profile, assemble any and all facts about your target customer on a large piece of poster paper: age, employer, education level, income, family status, hobbies, politics (if relevant), favorite brand of automobile, or anything else that helps you focus on this person. Also list your target customer’s motivations: what he or she cares about in life and how you can help him or her achieve those goals. Finally, cut and paste one to three pictures out of magazine ads to represent the face or faces of your target customer. This is the audience you have to focus your marketing program on. Everything from product design or selection to the content, timing, and placement of ads must specifically target these people.
You can further increase your focus on your target customer by deciding whether he or she prefers marketing that takes a rational, information-based approach; an emotional, personality-based approach; or a balanced mix of the two. By simply being clear about whom to target and whether to market to them in an informational or emotional manner, you ensure that your marketing program has a clear focus.
Identifying and playing up your strengths
One of the best steps you can take as a marketer is to find your chief strengths and build on them so you can add an additional degree of focus and momentum to your marketing program. The key is to always think about what you do well for the customer (don’t get hung up on shortcomings) and make sure you build on your strengths in everything you do.
For example, imagine that customers say your pricing isn’t as good as larger competitors, and you also feel that your brand name isn’t very well known. That’s the bad news, but the good news is that existing customers are loyal because they like your product and service. The thing to do here is build on this strength by creating a loyalty program for customers, asking for and rewarding referrals, and including testimonials in your marketing materials and on your website. Also, remind customers and prospects that you are the local alternative. “Shop Locally to Support Your Community” may be a good phrase to sneak into every marketing communication, whether on paper, signs, your vehicles, or the web. Building on your strength in this manner can help you overcome the weaknesses of your higher pricing and lesser name recognition.
Focus on your strengths by clearly and succinctly defining what your special strength or advantage is. Grab a piece of paper and a pen and start your sentence like this: “My product (or service) is special because… .” Take a minute to think about what makes your firm or product special and why customers have been attracted to you in the past. Then make sure you talk about your strengths or show them visually whenever you communicate with customers. (Some marketers call the resulting statement of what makes you special a unique selling proposition, or USP. As its name implies, it ought to be unique to your product, to help differentiate it from your competitors.)
Discovering the best way to find customers
Another aspect of your customer focus is deciding whether you want to emphasize attracting new customers or retaining and growing existing customers. One or the other may need to dominate your marketing program, or perhaps you need to balance the two. Marketing to new prospects is usually a different sort of challenge from working with existing customers, so knowing which goal is most important helps you improve the focus of your marketing.
I periodically survey managers of successful businesses to ask them about their marketing practices. The first and most revealing question I ask is, “What’s your best way to attract customers?” Here are some of the most common answers — things that marketers often say are most effective at bringing them customers:
Referrals: Your customers may be willing to help you sell your product (see coverage of word of mouth in Chapter 11 for how to stimulate referrals).Social media: Your presence as a provider of helpful or interesting content can’t be underestimated in its potential impact on brand development and as a source of customer leads, so try to get ever more comfortable with blogging, Twitter, Facebook, and similar options (see Chapters 10, 11, and 13).Trade shows and professional association meetings: Making contacts and being visible in the right professional venue may be a powerful way to build your business (see Chapter 12).Sales calls: Salespeople sell products, so make more calls yourself, or find a way to put commissioned salespeople or sales representatives to work for you (see Chapter 17).Advertising: Advertising sells the product, but only if you do it consistently and frequently, whether in print, on radio and TV, outdoors, or on the web (see Chapters 7, 8, 9, and 10).Product demonstrations, trial coupons, or distribution of free samples: If your product is impressive, let it sell itself (see Chapters 14 and 15).Placement and appearance of buildings/stores: Location is still one of the simplest and best formulas for marketing success (see Chapter 10 to position yourself for high web traffic and Chapter 16 for prominent placement in the real world).As the preceding list indicates, every business has a different optimal formula for attracting customers. However, in every case, successful businesses report that one or two methods work best. Their programs are therefore dominated by one or two effective ways of attracting customers. They put between one-third and two-thirds of their marketing resources into their primary way of attracting customers and then use other marketing methods to support their most effective method.
To find your business’s most effective way of reaching out to customers, you need to ask yourself this important question: What’s my best way to attract customers, and how can I focus my marketing program to take fuller advantage of it? You can’t look the answer up in a book, but you can take heart from the fact that, with persistence, you’ll eventually work out what your winning formula is, and then you may have to make only minor changes from year to year to keep your program working well.
When you answer this question, you’re taking yet another important step toward a highly focused marketing program that leverages your resources as much as possible. Your marketing program can probably be divided into four tiers of activities:
Major impactHelpful; secondary impactMinor impactMoney loser; very low impactIf you reorganize last year’s budget into these categories, you may find that your spending isn’t concentrated near the top of your list. If that’s the case, then you can try to move up your focus and spending. Cut the bottom tier, where your marketing effort and spending isn’t paying off. Reduce the next level of spending and shift your spending to one or two activities with the biggest impact.
I call this the marketing pyramid, and in workshops, I challenge marketers to try to move their spending up the pyramid so their marketing resources are concentrated near the top (which reflects the most effective activities). Ideally, the pyramid gets turned upside down, with most of the spending on the top floor rather than the bottom. What does your marketing pyramid look like? Can you move up it by shifting resources and investments to higher-impact marketing activities? Ideally, your marketing pyramid should have clear distinctions between the primary, secondary, and tertiary activities so you know where to concentrate your resources for best effect.
If you haven’t done much marketing yet, go forth and ask nosey questions. Find marketers who sell something at least remotely similar to what you plan to sell, and ask them what activities bring them customers. First, draw out a list of at least six different things they do to find or close customers. Then ask them which are the most and least effective. Combine all this data into a speculative marketing pyramid, and begin to get quotes on and experiment with the methods yourself. Hopefully, the benchmark information you gathered will get you closer to an effective program the first time around, but plan on testing and refining your methods. Each marketer’s winning formula is unique. There is no one sure-fire marketing plan that everybody can use.
Embracing sustainability
Sustainable marketing is the thoughtful selection or modification of methods, materials, and technologies to make your marketing, and your organization in general, more sustainable environmentally as well as economically. You may not have heard the term, but it’s a good bet that you will in the future, because sustainability is looming as the greatest long-term challenge ahead for society and business in general. Innovators who seek to make marketing more local, more low-impact, more natural, and less wasteful (of time and tangible resources) will be seen as leaders in their field in the future — a fact that makes sustainable marketing an interesting frontier to think about as you design your next marketing program.
Finding Your Marketing Formula
A marketing program should be based on a marketing strategy, which is the big-picture idea driving your success (if you don’t have one yet, check out Chapter 2). The marketing program is all the coordinated activities that together make up the tactics to implement that strategy. To make both strategy and program clear, write them up in a marketing plan (see Chapter 3).
For example, a general contractor (builder) may choose the strategy of renovating and building residential homes close to downtown areas in appealing smaller cities and larger suburbs in their region to take advantage of a trend where professional couples are moving out of the suburbs and back to revitalized downtowns. Stating this strategy clearly is a great way to bring focus to the marketing program. You now know what kinds of projects to talk about in blogs and to local media and acquaintances and to show in your website portfolio. And you know who your customers are and will soon be brainstorming ways to find more of them (for example, by networking to local realtors who help relocate them).
You don’t have to get fully into the technicalities of strategies and plans right now, because in this chapter, I go over a lot of simpler, quicker actions you can take to leverage your marketing activities into a winning program. The following sections require you to think about and write down some ideas, so get out your pencil and paper or tablet to jot down notes while you’re reading.
Analyzing your Five Ps
What really matters in marketing are the points of contact between the customer and your communications, products, and people. These customer interactions (or influence points) with you constitute your marketing program. I always take care to list these influence points when designing a marketing program. To make a list of your own influence points, use the following Five Ps of marketing for your categories.
Product
Determine which aspects of the product itself are important and have an influence on customer perception and purchase intentions. List all tangible features plus intangibles, such as personality, look and feel, and packaging — these are the aspects (both rational features and emotional impressions) of your product that influence customer perception.
First impressions are important for initial purchase, but performance of the product over time is more important for repurchase and referrals.
Price
List the aspects of price that influence customer perception. What does it cost the customer to get and use your product? The list price is often an important element of the customer’s perception of price, but it isn’t the only one. Discounts and special offers belong on your list of price-based influence points, too. And don’t forget any extra costs the customer may have to incur, like the cost of switching from another product to yours; extra costs can really affect a customer’s perception of how attractive your product is. (If you can find ways to make switching from the competitor’s product to yours easier or cheaper, you may be able to charge more for your product and still make more sales.)
Placement
List the aspects of placement or distribution (in both time and space) that influence the accessibility of your product. When and where is your product available to customers? Place is a big influence, because most of the time, customers aren’t actively shopping for your product. Nobody runs around all day every day looking for what you want to sell her. When someone wants something, she’s most strongly influenced by what’s available to her. Getting the place and timing right is a big part of success in marketing and often very difficult (see Chapter 16 for help with placement).
The web allows you to define your market narrowly and locally, or globally, or (and this is the really exciting idea that many businesses haven’t yet picked up on) in local markets other than your physical one. For example, if you have a bookstore specializing in children’s and young adult titles, then you would do best to be present in the local areas where there are the most children and young adult readers (see Chapter 4 for how to sleuth out demographic growth waves). The web can narrowly target the top five cities for your product. (See Part IV for lots of low-cost ways to find the best customers in the best markets.)
Promotion
List all the ways you have to promote your offering by communicating with customers and prospects. Do you have a website? Do you routinely update your blog, Facebook page, and Pinterest boards? Do you advertise? Send mailings? Hand out brochures? What about the visibility of signs on buildings or vehicles? Do distributors or other marketing partners also communicate with your customer? If so, include their promotional materials and methods in your marketing program, because they help shape the customer’s perception, too. And what about other routine elements of customer communication, like bills? They’re yet another part of the impression your marketing communications make.
The web hasn’t finished revolutionizing promotion, and you can innovate to get messages out creatively and inexpensively in a lot of ways (see Chapter 10 for details).
People
The fifth P is perhaps the most important one, because without people, you can’t have a marketing program. List all the points of human contact that may be important to the success of your program. If you run a small business, this list may just be a handful of people, but even so, include this list in your planning and think about ways each person can help make a positive impression and encourage a sale.
The web has also revolutionized the process of making connections with people. Your professional and business Facebook pages, your blogs (which should be pulled into your Facebook page and your website), your tweets, your Pinterest boards, and so forth are all opportunities to build followers and friendships.
Refining your list of possibilities
You need to find efficient, effective ways to positively influence customer perception. You want to use elements of your marketing program to motivate customers to buy and use your product (service, firm, whatever). The list of your current influence points for each of your Five Ps (see the previous related sections) is just a starting point on your journey to an optimal marketing program.
Now ask yourself the following questions: What can be subtracted because it isn’t working effectively? What can be emphasized or added? Think about each of the Five Ps and try to add more possible influence points. Look to competitors or successful marketers from outside your product category and industry for some fresh ideas. The longer your list of possibilities, the more likely you are to find really good things to include in your marketing program. But in the end, don’t forget to focus on the handful of influence points that give you the biggest effect.
To craft your own winning formula, think of one or more new ways to reach and influence your customers and prospects in each of the Five Ps and add them to your list as possibilities for your next marketing program.
Avoiding the pricing trap
Don’t be tempted to make price the main focus of your marketing program. Many marketers emphasize discounts and low prices to attract customers. But price is a dangerous emphasis for any marketing program because you’re buying customers rather than winning them. That’s a very, very hard way to make a profit. So unless you actually have a sustainable cost advantage (a rare thing in business), don’t allow low prices or coupons and discounts to dominate your marketing program. Price reasonably, use discounts and price-off coupons sparingly, and look for other tactics to focus on in your marketing program.
Controlling Your Marketing Program
Little details can and do make all the difference in closing a sale! Does your marketing program display inconsistencies and miss opportunities to get the message across fully and well? If so, you can increase your program’s effectiveness by eliminating these pockets of inconsistency to prevent out-of-control marketing.
Consider the numerous eBay sellers who fail to take and post high-quality photographs of the products they’re trying to sell and then wonder why they get few bidders and have to sell for low prices. These sellers can easily upgrade their photography, but they fail to recognize the problem, so they allow this critical part of their marketing mix to remain poorly managed.
Given the reality that some of your influence points may be partially or fully uncontrolled right now, draw up a list of inconsistent and/or uncontrolled elements of your marketing program. I think you’ll find some inconsistencies in each of the Five Ps of your program (don’t worry, though, that’s common!). If you can make even one of your marketing elements work better and more consistently with your overall program and its focus, you’re improving the effectiveness of your marketing. Answer the questions in Table 1-1 to pinpoint elements of your marketing mix that you need to pay more attention to.
Table 1-1 Getting a Grip on Your Marketing Program
Customer Focus
Define your customers clearly: Who are they? Where and when do they want to buy?
Are they new customers, existing customers, or a balanced mix of both?
Understand what emotional elements make customers buy: What personality should your brand have? How should customers feel about your product?
Understand what functional elements make customers buy: What features do they want and need? What information do they need to see to make their decision?
Product Attraction
What attracts customers to your product?
What’s your special brilliance that sets you apart in the marketplace?
Do you reflect your brilliance throughout all your marketing efforts?
Most Effective Methods
What’s the most effective thing you can do to attract customers?
