Simple Marketing Clues

Here are some simple clues on marketing that you may be able to implement in your own business:

1.  DEVELOP A STRATEGY for your brand or service and then everyone in the company needs to buy into that strategy.

2.  FOCUS ON WHAT YOUR MARKETING NEEDS TO ACHIEVE for your business.  Be single minded. Don’t be distracted by what your competitors are doing or by clever marketing gimmicks. Stick to your strategy.

3.  SPEAK WITH ONE VOICE.  Don’t say or promise too many things or you will confuse people. All your marketing tools, your brochure or your website or newspaper advertisements, need to speak with one voice and one message.

4.  DON’T TRY TO COMMUNICATE EVERYTHING.  Too many companies want to include the full book about their product or service in a magazine advertisement or television commercial. All they successfully do is bore everyone and turn customers off.

5.  BREAK THE PATTERN.  Whatever you are doing now, you are not standing out. You may feel comfortable and happy because you are employing nice, traditional communication tactics. But you need to break the pattern and be uncomfortable with it. Then you will stand out and see results.

6.  REFLECT WHO YOU WANT TO BE.  Make sure your advertising and everything you do in marketing is a reflection of what you want to portray as a company. What do you stand for as a company? Does everything you do, spoken by staff or written and visual (such as colours and typeface), reflect your company or product?

7.  MEASURE YOUR MARKETING SUCCESS.  If you are a retailer and your product is sold through supermarkets, you expect cash registers to ring. If you are in the service industry, you need sales leads. If you are trying to change the image of your company, you need to have some trigger in place that enables you to measure whether your marketing is working. Good marketing is extremely powerful, so just spending money on marketing and not measuring the results is poor management.

8.  THE TIMING OF YOUR SUCCESS. You need to know what you want your marketing to achieve… and by when! A timeline is important. It also needs to be realistic and achievable.

9.  RESEARCH. Research can be a great tool in marketing, but it can also be overused and abused. I have often sat with clients watching research companies conduct surveys and focus groups. I have then skimmed across the research data provided after the event and come to my own conclusions about where we need to go. Researchers will provide their own overview for you, but in the end they often do not understand your product or service… or even your market. Most of their work is done in a clinical environment and it can only give you a view based on that environment.  The co-founder of advertising firm Doyle Dane Bernbach International, Bill Bernbach, once said:

We are so busy measuring public opinion that we forget we can mold it. We are so busy listening to statistics we forget we can create them.”

We need to realize that we can actually go out and create the market or build it to a new level! Use research as a tool but don’t let it hold you back.


Peter Irvine
www.peterirvine.com
Peter is Co-Founder of Gloria Jean’s Coffees, author of ‘Win In Business’ and ‘Building your Business, your People, your Life’ and keynote speaker.

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