Marketing Manner

When you decide you need to redo your marketing strategy, what do you do first? I hope you create a detailed marketing plan. Fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants when marketing won’t get you very far. You’ll never know if your marketing strategies have been successful if you don’t have a plan in place to measure your efforts against. So how do you know if you’ve succeeded in meeting your plan’s goals? 

You need to create a marketing plan that includes measurable goals.

It doesn’t sound as hard or tedious as it sounds. The key to make something measurable is to add numbers. While you’re creating your marketing plan, make all of your goals, often referred to as objectives, specific and clear so that they can be easily measured.

Marketing Objectives
You need a “marketing objectives” section in your marketing plan, which is where you put to paper what you want your marketing plan to achieve in the coming year. Each marketing objective should include a description of what you what to accomplish along with numbers to give you something concrete to aim for. For instance, you can say you want to become one of the top selling baseball hat companies in the American marketplace by the end of the year. That’s a somewhat measureable goal by you looking at the marketplace at the end of the year, but it will be easier to measure if you add some numbers. Let’s say you want over 35% of the American baseball hat marketplace to belong to you. This is a much better goal because it’s measurable with numbers, meaning there won’t be any ambiguity of whether you met your goal.

Benchmarking
You can keep track of your results by including specific benchmarks in your plan. Examples of benchmarks could include “selling 500 widgets by the first quarter,” or “having 100 people visit our Web site to learn about the product by XX date.” Now, you could have said “having more people visit our Web site” but by adding a number and date to the benchmark, and the reason for visiting your Web site (which is measurable by seeing which pages of your site they visit), you’ve just made that benchmark measurable.

Now you’ve got an easy way to see if your marketing objective is being met, and if not, you’ll know you need to change your strategy. By adding a specific date, you can take action now rather than waiting until next year to figure out what you were doing wrong.

Keeping Track of Results
You need a way to track how well your marketing plan is working. Schedule monthly or quarterly meetings and spell out in writing what your definition of marketing success is. If one goal is to create a higher sell-thru rate, you’ll need to decide on a specific number that will constitute a success for sell-thru numbers by a certain date. If you don’t meet this specific objective when you get numbers back from the suppliers and stores, you’ll know you need to work with your packaging or advertising strategies.

Also write down how you intend to track sales and costs, and at what point will your marketing plan change? For instance, you might tweak your marketing plan if you lose 10% of customers in the first quarter. Marketing isn’t science – you can use whatever metrics you’d like to measure success. Just make sure you always measure and measure consistently.

So the average number of Web pages Google had available to index in 1998 was about 25 million. As of summer 2008, do you know how many unique Web pages Google had available to index? A record-breaking 1 trillion unique Web pages. That’s right 1 trillion.

Also, 65,000 new videos are added to YouTube on a daily basis.

In 2005 (the most recent year available), almost 40 billion product catalogs were published. That equals 134 catalogs for every person in the United States. Who needs that many catalogs?

The American Association of Advertising Agencies says people are only able to absorb, at most, 100 ads per day out of the 2,000 to 3,000 we are exposed to.

And, people just don’t trust advertisers. In an old Gallup poll from 1998 that rated honesty and ethical standards against a range of professions, advertising pros were near the bottom of the list, between lawyers and car salespeople. Ouch. 

So who do people trust? “‘Word-of-mouth’ [is] the most powerful selling tool…78 percent of consumers say they trust the recommendation of other consumers.” – Nielsen, Trust in Advertising, 2007 Global Consumer Survey Report. This is especially true of the young generation of 14-24 year olds. This age group spends more than 16 hours online (that’s more than they spend watching TV!). They also like to send IMs – 56 percent say they spend more than an hour each day texting or instant messaging. A full 25 percent prefer social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace than actually hanging out in real life with their friends. And, finally, 96 percent use a social networking site every day.

That means their friends mean more to them and have more communication with them than your ads ever could.

What does this mean for you?

You need to get on the social networking sites and fast.

According to a Prospectiv survey conducted in early 2008, 87 percent of those polled (800 users of social networking sites) felt that targeted ads on social networking sites didn’t match their preferences. This means that you actually have to put some thought into the ads you use on social networking sites. Using blogs and reviews might actually work better in the long run than just advertising on these sites. By actually creating a relationship with people, you’ll earn their trust.

The ads that did work on social networking sites were one-off coupons and discount offers from brands and products that users already purchase. Take the time to really target your ads by using technology that lets you read more about the user. Knowing their occupation or interests is key to getting a targeted ad that will get a click-thru.

By getting on social networking sites as a user and an advertiser, you’ll create memorability and trust. By users repeatedly seeing your ads, they’ll be more likely to click on them.

I’m not going to try to say that this is what you should use for your marketing plan. I’m not even going to suggest any specific marketing plans. Unless I actually work for the company, and unless I’m well versed in the industry and the customers, I’m not going to be able to come up with anything worthwhile anyways.

There’s the first lesson to take to heart. Only someone who knows a lot about their industry and their company will have any hope of coming up with a successful marketing plan. If you own the company than you will be the best person to do it, but what I can and will do is mention some guidelines that will apply to any company.

The first thing is what you’ve hopefully already started doing: pay attention to the world around you. What I mean is look to the competition, look to your customers, and look to whatever else in your industry that you can to get a feel for what is already being done in relation to marketing.

You can’t start designing and implementing a marketing plan until you know what type of advertisements to use. If your competition is using direct mail postcards than they might be onto something. Figure out why they’re using them and if they’re working.

Once you know the industry take the time to assess your own strengths and weaknesses. What is it that you’re going to be offering to people and what makes you better than the competition? Also, figure out what it is that you can’t compete as well with. Maybe your service is a lot better, but you have to charge a higher price because of it.

Your strength is what your marketing needs to emphasize while you need to make sure to counteract your weakness as best as possible. If you have brochures printed up don’t necessarily shy away from the fact that you charge more, but explain that you offer things the competition can’t match, and you’re more than worth the higher price.

Next, set a goal and make sure you stick by it. Draw up a timetable if you need to that says, “I’m going to get this many posters printed by this date,” and don’t let yourself fall short of your goals.

Finally, decide on the best way to implement your marketing. If you are printing up posters be sure you know where to put them and how many you’re going to need. Be sure you know all the details of your marketing before you get started to avoid any avoidable problems. Ask yourself what can go wrong and try to be prepared for all of it.

The heart of any strong marketing push will always be a combination of two things: knowing yourself and knowing your market. If you have these two things down you’ll be in a prime position to develop a strong marketing agenda.