Whether you’re embarking on a new marketing campaign, improving your web presence, or simply sending a sales letter to a group of customers, every marketing move you make should fall under the umbrella of your marketing strategy.

Here are a few tips to help make your strategy as effective as possible.

Know the Market

The first thing your strategy should consider is your market. Who are your customers? What do they want? What do they want for free, what are they willing to pay for, and how much will they pay for it?

When you are rolling out a new product, you should have a picture in your mind of precisely who is going to buy it. If you don’t, then you should be doing a lot more research ahead of time.

Find your Niche

Every product and service on the market should be there as an answer to some need or problem. Moreover, what differentiates your product from your competitors’, and why should your potential customers choose you. Your marketing strategy should attempt to answer these questions.

Define your Goals

This is perhaps the most significant part of your marketing strategy. When you’ve identified who you are going to sell to, and on which basis you’re going to promote your product, you need to define a plan to move people from conviction to action.

In other words, convincing your potential customers that your product is the best product on the market is one thing, but how are you actually going to get them to open up their wallets and buy your product?

There are a number of ways that you can do this, including directing customers to your website, or getting them on the phone so that you can drive them to action personally. Whatever option you choose, it needs to be defined in detail beforehand. All the advertising in the world won’t get you anywhere if it doesn’t leave people with a definite channel through which they can buy your product.

Test your Results

Testing is the final key to any marketing strategy. You will never get everything perfect ahead of time. Your marketing roadmap should ideally be in a constant state of flux. As you implement new marketing campaigns, you should be testing what works and what doesn’t work. Improve on the good, and get rid of the bad.

Happy marketing!

Sean

Sean McPheat

Marketing Consultant – Sales Expert - Motivational Speaker

Isolating buzz words is a crucial part of the marketing game.  Every single marketer needs to take time to step back and identify the words that will most accurately identify their products while making them sound appealing to customers.

It is far from a new concept.  Individuals who have been peddling products for centuries have attempted to identify words that best attracted customers to a product, whether with titillating hair tonics or classic, comfortable jeans.  Today, companies spend tens of thousands of dollars working with test groups to find out exactly what sorts of words customers most prefer for products and which will propel them into buying products faster and in greater quantity.

You should be doing the same for whatever it is that you are trying to market to potential buyers.  If you operate an auto shop and want to attract new business through a website you should be working out which words your potential customers most strongly gravitate toward – probably words that are related to speed, quality and knowledge.  If you sell books and are designing a mailer to send to current customers, you need to find out what specific words brought them there in the first place and create content rich with such terms.

When working out buzz words, however, you can go too far, and it can wind up badly damaging your product.  Perhaps the finest example of this might be the numerous brands of bottled water being marketed as “organic” that are available on the market today.  There is no doubt that marketing divisions for such companies wanted to capture the essence of the green revolution and capitalise on the willingness of many consumers to buy anything that says “eco” anywhere on a product’s packaging.

A widely purchased American brand of bottled water sold in large grocery stores has been heralded as being completely organic, marketed as being free of growth hormones and genetic modification.

What company would be foolish enough to apply growth hormones or generic modification to a product that does not grow or have genes in the first place?

Of course, U.K. brands like Illanllyr that market their bottles of water as organic are equally ridiculous – water cannot be organic.  It is not living, does not contain carbon, and as such is excluded from even having the possibility of being identified as organic by most government.  (Even though, scientifically it is organic in terms of being something that the earth produces.)

But do such strategies really hurt anything?  After all, if consumers are so wild about green products and just need to hear buzz words to buy a product, is there actually anything wrong with marketing them as organic when they aren’t?

The resounding answer to both questions is yes, and on two counts.  Ethical concerns are the most obvious – labelling a product that cannot be “organic” as such is an outright lie.  Perhaps just as important is that consumers are not complete fools.  While they may be willing to jump for the first brand of paper towels with pretty, green packaging, they are able to identify such foolish use of buzz words and will run from such products.

That is probably why so-called organic water products are not finding much consumer support, and that is precisely why you need to be careful in crafting buzz words for your products.

Happy marketing!

Sean

Sean McPheat

Marketing Consultant – Sales Expert - Motivational Speaker

My product is better than yours.

X Company created the widget 10 years ago. You’ve just created the advanced widget with 3 new features. What widget do you think the public is going to purchase? The one made by X Company, of course. They were on the market first, they’ve gained the public’s attention and – to be quite frank – no one cares that your widget is “better.” It’s not the trusted brand.

Can you describe your product?

If I listen to your sales presentation, watch your commercial, or visit your website, I am doing so for one reason. I want to know what your product is and why it will benefit me. I do not want to visit a website filled with life philosophies and descriptions of how much my life will improve if I have XYZ product. I want to know what it is, what it does, and what it means to me. If you can’t tell me about your product, you need to get back to the drawing board and do some more research. Come back when you’re ready to talk business.

Don’t let your head get too big.

Success is wonderful. Arrogance is not. Don’t let your success cause you to lose sight of your goals. Sometimes we become so confident in our successes that we forget we’re only human – and that we’re just as prone to mistakes as everyone else. Keep sight of your goals and objectives and don’t mistranslate success as power to do what you please. Above all, keep your customers happy.

You’re trying to make everyone happy.

It is not possible – ever – to make everyone happy all of the time. Make sure your company is strong in one or two key areas before adding another product or service line. Make sure each new line or department is strong and functional before adding another. It’s better to have only a handful of popular, high-quality services than to have two dozen sub-par quality services.

Are you focused on the numbers?

Focusing solely on the numbers is the worst thing you can do for your business. Sure, the stock market is going to watch you carefully. Sure, your competitors are hoping to see your profit margin fall. In the end, though, focusing on how to change the numbers isn’t going to solve your problems. Focusing on how to make your product and customer service better IS going to increase your numbers, regardless of what your competition may think.

Remember, your mistakes are your competitors’ gains. Work on cleaning up your marketing strategies and you won’t have to worry about giving your business away.

Sean

Sean McPheat

Marketing Consultant – Sales Expert

Leading marketing and sales guru, Sean McPheat looks at the rules and approach you should take to guarantee that you achieve nothing in 2009…

1. Don’t Set Goals

Start the year with no direction and no goals of what you want and just drift along like normal.

2. Listen To The Gloom Mongers

Wallow in your own self pity and get caught up with all of the excuses of the credit crunch and blame that for any bad luck that you get

3. If At First You Don’t Succeed….Give Up

When the going gets tough just throw in the towel, it’s a lot easier than fighting back

4. Do Your Own Thing

Forget what your prospects and customers want. What do they know?! Just do your own thing without understanding their needs

5. Hire Poor People

Why would you want to hire the best people? They know it all, want £50k a year and are a real pain in the ass! Instead, hire numbskulls who know jack and you can be guaranteed that they’ll muck everything up for you

6. Being Fat Is Great!

Forget about doing things slicker, better, quicker and more efficiently. “Fat is the new thin” make sure that you’re overstaffed, pay over the odds and don’t shop around for supplier alternatives

7. Half Of My Advertising Is Wasted – I Just Don’t Know Which Half!

Forget about advertising and forget about marketing – if you’ve got a good name they’ll beat a path to your door anyhow won’t they?

8. Talking Is Over Rated

Why make sure that you’ve got clear communication lines in place when everyone has got email? I mean, what’s the point in talking when you can just ping emails to each other all day long.

9. Busy, Busy, Busy

Don’t delegate any tasks, make sure you do as much as you can as often as you can. It’s much better to feel stressed out all of the time and that you look busy. Never walk around with nothing in your hand – always carry a piece of paper, it makes you look far busier.

10. Gear Up For 2010

Half way through the year put any major projects “on hold” or recap your strategy in lieu of another year being just around the corner when you can carry out steps 1-10 all over again

Of course, you could always do the complete opposite and become a raving success but we’ll leave it up to you…

Happy 2010!

Sean McPheat

The Leading Authority On How To Market & Sell To The Modern Day Buyer

http://www.seanmcpheat.com

1. They rely on one marketing method

Too many businesses focus on one marketing method instead of having a mix of different ways to bring in prospects. Sure, you will have a dominant method that brings in most of your revenue but make sure you get clients from other marketing avenues too or you become exposed to market conditions and variables that are sometimes out of your control.

2. You work in your business all of the time and not on your business

Make sure that you take a step back and work on your business. It’s strategy and planning needs to be well thought through. If you have to work “in” your business as an employee that’s understandable because of it’s size but make sure you set aside some time for you to work on your business too.

3. You don’t have an internet marketing strategy in place

Whether you own a bricks and mortar store or not you still need to think about an internet presence and using it for all of your branding and on your marketing literature.

Think about how your prospects will find you in the future and make sure they can find you online!

4. Not measuring your marketing efforts

You need to be able to measure and track each of your marketing campaigns and how successful each one is. You need to test your campaigns and refine them until you work out what works and what doesn’t

5. You don’t have a marketing strategy in place for your existing clients

Many small businesses focus all of their marketing efforts on getting new business but you should never neglect marketing to your existing clients. There is a potential goldmine in your current client base so don’t ignore them – you’ve done the hard work in getting them to be your clients now keep them and make sure you earn from them.

Avoid these marketing mistakes like the plague!

Happy marketing

Sean

Sean McPheat
The LEADING AUTHORITY on how to market and sell to the sophisticated and sales savvy buyer of today