Spend your marketing dollars wisely
You're launching a new business and you need customers. You know you have to spend some real money on a marketing campaign to start generating sales. You're ready to get going. Let's start advertising!
But wait just a minute. Before you get out your checkbook, take a bit of time to determine what exactly you want to achieve with your marketing campaign. After all, you're going to be spending a lot of time and money, so you need a clear idea of what you hope the outcome will be. You've got a much better chance of success if you're clear about your marketing objectives.
The major objectives of marketing campaigns fall in the following categories:
- Awareness. Aimed at getting customers, the public and your industry to know about your company, products, services, Web site, or other offerings. This includes launching a new company, new product, service, or Web site as well as adding new features, or major price changes.
- Action. Aimed at getting customers (or others) to do something specific in response to your marketing activities. This includes making a purchase, visiting your Web site, taking advantage of a special offer, coming into your place of business, clicking through on an Internet ad to your Web site.
- Brand building. Aimed at getting the public to know and remember the name of your company, products and services. This includes general advertising and marketing campaigns to keep name recognition high and continually staying in the public eye.
- Affiliation. Aimed at getting customers to feel they are somehow connected with or aligned with you, that they share your same social values (such as concern for the environment or animals) or because celebrities or athletes they respect use your product or from membership. This includes wanting to show others they use your products or services (by wearing your company name/logo), joining a mailing list, signing up for a company newsletter.
- Attitude. Aimed at getting others to think of you in a positive light. This includes showing you're innovative or cutting-edge, confirming your place as market leader, demonstrating that you're better than the competition.
- Announcement. Aimed at getting others (including the financial press, potential investors, your industry) to know something positive about your company. This includes key milestones, awards, mergers and acquisitions.
Once you know your objectives, you're in a much better position to figure out the marketing tactics you'll use to achieve those objectives.
For example, say you were launching a new company making high performance, fashionable skiwear for women. I'll call the company SleekSki. Your marketing objectives and the tactics you'd then choose might be as follows:
Awareness. Objectives: Let women skiers know about our new company and the advantages of our skiwear. Tactics: advertise in style and sports sections of local newspapers and ski magazines, hold fashion shows at ski resorts, get displays at ski shops.
Action: Objectives: Get women skiers to visit our Web site, take advantage of our introductory offer of 30 percent off, sign up for our email newsletter, attend a fashion show we're going to hold at a ski resort. Tactic: buy a mailing list of women skiers and send direct mail, buy ad words on search engines, put coupon in local newspapers.
Brand building. Objectives: Get the SleekSki name known to women skiers and ski shops. Tactics: Hire public relations firm to get stories about us in newspapers and magazines, exhibit at winter sporting goods trade show, get ski bloggers to write about us and link to our site.
Affiliation. Objectives: Get women skiers to feel better about themselves when wearing SleekSki apparel. Tactics: Find popular women skiers at leading ski resorts to wear our apparel, put our decals on their skis.
Attitude. Objectives: Become known as the skiwear line that winning female ski competitors use, create the belief that wearing our skiwear makes you both a better skier and more attractive. Tactics: Sponsor winning female skiers and get them to wear our skiwear in competitions. Work to get positive reviews in ski magazines and conduct clinics at ski resorts.
Announcement. Objectives: Inform the sporting goods industry when we sign winning female ski competitors as endorsers. Tactics: Advertise in industry publications.
Now, put your checkbook to good use. Go out and place the advertising that meets your objectives and land those customers.
WBJ Web Partners
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