Marketing

Peter Spalton

• Publisher: HarperCollins Business
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780007328116
• eBook ISBN: 9780007358946
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

The marketing secrets that experts and top professionals use.

Get results fast with this quick, easy guide to the fundamentals of Marketing
Includes how to:
• Position your product for a target market
• Build a brilliant marketing plan
• Create stunning branded marketing materials
• Use memorable publicity to build market interest
• Take advantage of new technology

Devise your promotional mix

Promotion is the fourth and final marketing ‘P’ and is the sexy side of the business. There are hundreds of ways that you can promote your business and products, and you need to create your own promotional mix. A variety of strategies must be used, and what you have to do is choose the method that’s right for customers at each stage in the buying process. You’ll need to devise, manage and monitor many different promotional activities.

5.1
“Shoot with a rifle, not a shotgun”

Nobody can afford to promote their product to everyone. You just don’t have enough money for that. And anyway, bear in mind that most people will probably never buy your product and many won’t want to buy it at the moment.

The key to promotion is to use your money wisely. The rule is “shoot with a rifle, not a shotgun”. Ask yourself three questions.

1 What do my potential customers read, watch or listen to? To find out, you’ll have to ask them. Or, you can search through various media directories and look at their target readership.

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2 What other products do my potential customers buy? The point here is to find out where to target your advertising. If you sell luxury cars, for example, you might put your adverts in a golfing publication or posters at a golf club.

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3 How will I recognize when they’re ready to buy? This is more difficult, but you must remember that you can’t use the same promotional material at all the buying stages (See Secret 2.3).

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the problem is I do not know which half”

Lord Leverhulme, British industrialist of the early 20th century

During the first stage of the customers buying process, you must make sure that they know about you. Use awareness advertising and entries in directories such as Yellow Pages. But remember that, unless you sell your product all over the country, you will waste money advertising in all the national newspapers. In fact, each newspaper and magazine targets a particular type of reader, and you must match this with the work you did on your ideal customer (Secret 2.2).

Even if you stand in the street and hand leaflets to people who pass by, you must be selective. Go back to the demographics of your ideal customer, and only give leaflets to people who look the right age.

In Secret 2.4, we looked at how many people can get involved in a purchase, and how they want different sorts of information. Technical people don’t need or want your corporate brochure. And often, the person who actually has the money doesn’t want the technical specification of your product.

Similarly, if you do a mail shot, check that the companies or the people you are targeting are currently at their address and haven’t moved. And, if you address them by name, check that you have used the correct spelling. Few things upset potential customers more than getting their names wrong.

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Don’t throw money away by promoting products to everybody; focus your efforts on people who are ready to buy.

5.2
Grab their attention

Every piece of promotion is about communication. You tell your market audience something about your business, your products and what you stand for. And you expect them to do something as a result. But nowadays, people always seem to be in a rush. Their time is limited and they’ll quickly move on if you don’t grab their attention and keep their interest in what you’re saying.

Marketing people use a check list, known as AIDA, to help them with any piece of communication they create. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a letter, an email, an advert, a brochure or a radio commercial. The same rules apply.

• A = Attention. You are probably interrupting your target audience, so you must grab their attention and make them listen to what you’re saying. It could be a headline, a photograph or a jingle.
• I = Interest. When you’ve grabbed their attention you need to draw them in. You must say things that will interest them and keep them fixed on what you’re saying.

one minute wonder Take one of your brochures and ask yourself, does the cover make me want to open it and read the contents? If it doesn’t, you’ve broken the first two rules – that you must grab the people’s attention and keep their interest.

• D = Desire. This is the most difficult part. But you must create and build their desire for your offering, your product and your business. Think about the expression “sell the sizzle, not the sausage”.
• A = Action. You will have a reason to talk to them and they need to know what you want them to do. Otherwise it’s “so what” for them and a waste of money for you. Do you want them to remember your slogan, look at your website, phone you or go and buy your product?

It doesn’t really matter how carefully you’ve written your piece of promotion, or how wonderful you think it is. What really matters is what your target audience think, and whether they will do what you want. You must try out your promotional piece with some of your target audience and measure the result. Do a small sample and see what happens; make a couple of changes, and do it again. The marketing mantra with promotion is, “test, test and test”.

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Promotion is about communication. The most important things are what you say, how you say it and what you expect your potential customers to do.

5.3
Cover all bases

Promotion is not about advertising and brochures alone, and we have loads of tools at our fingertips to bring into play. Indeed, you must be prepared to use every tool at your disposal to create the right mix of promotional work to handle potential customers in any given situation.

To begin with, all you need to do is pick one or two of the promotional tools in your armoury. Just make sure that they fit into the right stage of the buying process.

1 Need or want stage. You must make your target audience aware of your brand and what your company does. Use awareness advertising, posters, mail shots, directories, search engine positioning, competitions, give-aways, sponsorship and news releases. Keep repeating your message as people easily forget.

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2 Knowledge stage. Here, you must give enough information to enable your potential customers to make informed decisions. Use advertising, brochures, newsletters, press releases, feature articles, facts sheets, trade shows and exhibitions, seminars, your website and your blog.

“What really decides consumers to buy or not to buy is the content of your advertising, not its form” David Ogilvy, advertising guru

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3 Preference stage. At this point, you want your audience to choose your product over one of your competitors’. Use corporate brochures, trade shows and exhibitions, testimonials, case studies, money-back guarantees, free trials or other pilot schemes to reduce the risk for them.

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4 Buy and justify stage. This point is all about getting the customers to buy now. So, use time-limited discounts, low-interest loans and money-off vouchers to encourage them not to delay their decision for too long.

Your purpose at each stage is to give the customer just enough information to move onto the next point. In the final stage, you only have one aim: that is, to make them go and buy your product now.

Don’t forget that advertising can take two forms. Awareness advertising is all about getting your brand into the mind of the customer. But in the knowledge stage you must use more detailed advertising to give them quite a bit of information about your product and your business.

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You must pick the right mix of promotional tools for each stage in the buying process to move potential customers to the next stage.

5.4
Design posters and advertising

Most advertising is about how you build awareness of your business and your products. Your objective is either to make people remember you, or to make them want to know more. The exception is an advertisement to actually sell your product through the mail. Then you are “selling off the page”.

You can advertise in lots of different media, including the press, TV and radio. You can use posters, postcards, leaflet drops, letters and banner adverts on websites. Unfortunately, people nowadays are bombarded with advertising – it is estimated that, on average, Americans see over 300 adverts every day, for example. Given this deluge of information and messages, you must create something that’s really memorable if you want to stand out from the crowd.

A slogan is one of the best ways to do this, especially if you are using posters, where you often have less than a second to grab the public’s attention. The best slogans either come from a ‘eureka’ moment or from a brain-storming session with your colleagues.

“Make it simple. Make it memorable. Make it inviting to look at. Make it fun to read”

Leo Burnett, advertising executive

• Make it striking. Have something that sets you apart from the competition and sticks in people’s minds. Think, ‘Just do it’, from Nike and ‘Vorsprung durch Technik’, from Audi.
• Make it unforgettable. A good way to make people remember is to give your slogan a rhythm. Similarly, you could make it a rhyme. Think ‘Beanz Meanz Heinz’ and Mazda’s ‘Zoom zoom’.
• Make it say what you do. Try to make the slogan state a benefit, so that it ‘says what it does on the tin’. Examples include ‘We try harder’, from Avis and ‘The ultimate driving machine’, from BMW.
• Make it unusual. It doesn’t have to be words. It can be a sound, shape or a picture. Most people know the shape of the Coca Cola bottle and the sound of the Nokia tune, whether they have these products or not.
• Make it emotional. You must make people feel happy and warm, not sad and cold. Think of the adverts for Jack Daniel’s Tennessee whiskey and ‘Finger lickin’ good’, from KFC.
• Make it everywhere. You must put your slogan on every piece of communication. On the sign outside your building, at the foot of every letter and email you send, and on your product packaging.

You want people to remember your name. So associate your name w...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Marketing covers all parts of your business
• Marketing is a philosophy
• Identify markets
• Create what people want
• Look where people buy
• Devise your promotional mix
• Get on the Internet
• Make an achievable plan
• Jargon buster
• Further reading
• About the Author
• Copyright
• About the Publisher