A marketing strategy describes how an organization successfully engages its customers, faces competitors without any disputes, and achieves its goal. A key component of the marketing strategy is to keep marketing in line with the company’s underlying mission statement.
To maintain this strategy, a company should focus on three main points of view.
Industrial Marketing is more commonly referred to as B2B, or business to business marketing. When a business purchases from another business there is considerable cost savings. An example would be Business A sells to Business B in large quantity at wholesale, thereby reducing the cost of business for both parties. Business A is able to sell their product directly to a buyer without the need of extra advertising. Business B is able to purchase at below retail.
Business to Consumer (B2C) marketing is providing goods and services to consumers through e-commerce transactions. Sales are achieved using a combination of the following 4 methods:
The advantages to B2C marketing are as follows:
The key to effective B2C marketing is building a client base and keeping clients coming back. To accomplish this a company must have advertising placed strategically to attract their target consumers. Once they have a client base they must be willing to work with the customers to keep them coming back for repeat business.
Businesses should offer support for a wide variety of payment options. They should offer live assistance, both for sales and support after the sale has been made. Additionally, they should offer the ability to see or inspect the goods or services provided. This is often accomplished with pictures, descriptions, and retail facilities.
Covert advertising is a type of promotion that uses undercover tactics to raise the image of a brand or name and helps it to become both recognizable and memorable to the target audience. Covert advertising is presently a hot trend in the promotion of goods and services. The American business world presently pays between $900-$1100 per year per person on covert advertising. As a consumer, your brain is being taught to pay attention to certain messages by brilliant advertising strategists.
Global advertising is a form of advertising that approaches markets beyond the typical immediate frontiers. It is a way of creating new opportunities to expand our business horizons and compete worldwide. We take our own vision, our own products and sell them to someone else in the global market.
We don’t just create another product that sells in another place. Although we may have to adapt our product to some degree for sale outside our domestic markets, we retain our vision for our product and our company. While expanding globally can be a risky and difficult venture, the rewards are very likely to outweigh the complicated challenges.
The best reason to turn to global advertising is that there is basically unlimited potential to increases sales and make profits. The market expands daily as people hook up to and shop on the Internet. The global market is already there, it just needs products and an awareness of their availability.
Tapping into the global market means an ever expanding future for our current products. It leaves us less likely to fall victim to our current markets’ challenges, such as seasonal fluctuations. Global markets can extend our selling time frame and lessen our dependence on a single market.
As with any business venture, we need to do our research before implementing global advertising. We need to be sure that we actually have a unique product or idea that will sell outside of its current boundaries. There must be a demand for our product and we must be able to get it to the global market at a reasonable cost. Just like marketing a product domestically, we need reliable information to base our decisions on.
It is always helpful to find local experts in future areas of expansion as they can provide invaluable information about customs and expectations. They can help make local ads more effective by having first hand knowledge of the market which can help the product take off. We also need to be able to keep up with the demand we have created as our hard work begins to pay off.
As a product begins to sell, it is important to have a means of measuring the results. Each time we begin a new venture, it can take awhile to get up to speed. It may cost more than it is worth in the beginning, but profits should soon begin to outweigh the expenses. We need to give our advertising time to work while remaining conscious of accumulating costs.
Global advertising only makes sense for our domestic businesses. More markets mean more opportunities. Some obstacles will stand in the way of our global expansion, so we need to be prepared and we need to be patient. We need to build long lasting relationships with customers and continue to meet the ever changing needs of the global market.
In “The Political Economy of Culture,” Sut Jhally makes the distinction that Americans are free from government control over speech, but that control can come from other sources. The author asks, “[i]s there a contradiction between expecting the marketplace to provide genuine diversity while at the same time treating ideas as economic goods to be bought and sold?” Because those in power work toward perpetuating the status quo, Jhally writes, the industries that produce culture attempt to instill a particular consciousness in the public.
This consciousness “work[s] to legitimate the existing distribution of power by controlling the context within which people think and define social problems and their possible solutions.” In other words, the mental framework of the masses is established by movies, television, and literature. All of these are privately produced. Advertising is the engine that runs the apparatus.
Jhally surveys various points of view on the “consciousness industry.” Media venues do not sell entertainment or information: They sell audiences to advertisers. The consolidation of newspapers is one consequence of this model. According to the author this is the marketplace moving in “to replace older forms of cultural activity,” which were displaced by urbanization.
One impact is that culture is reduced from art to pure entertainment. It serves, then, only to distract from the deficiencies of interpersonal relationships in a capitalist society. Jhally criticizes the view that this is a conspiracy, and argues that it is driven more by the profit motive. Ultimately, communications must pass through the prism of advertiser influence and have mutated into the trite and glib; into the “imagistic modes rather than verbal, audio, and textual ones.”
Charles Eckert uses a narrower scope of real world examples to convey his message in “The Carole Lombard in Macy’s Window.” Honing in on the relationship between the Hollywood film industry and corporations, Eckert describes forces that arose at the beginning of the 20th Century, which produced a synergy that defines the American people’s relationship with mass entertainment and consumer goods. Realizing the money to be made from using films to advertise goods, corporations that would otherwise have little to do with the culture industry that Jhally describes are now responsible for the content of the media people consume.
Actually, this situation is multifaceted. Films display products prominently in order to raise public consciousness, and thus sales. Companies market products that allow people to mimic their movie idols. Because movies and products are tailored based on the machinations of corporations, popular culture has not only descended from art to pure entertainment, as Jhally argues, but from an organic entity to a synthetic one. Because advertisers need to place their products in a realistic setting, period pieces go out of fashion and modern films take the fore.
The above authorities are essentially in agreement that only a switch to a social order modeled on Marxism can possibly begin to recover what has been taken over by the phenomenon of advertising. Corporations are powerless to improve the situation as they are compelled to be the vehicles of all the deleterious effects of advertising by their mandate to maximize shareholder profit.
In many cases there is more of a benefit to gathers leads and resources manually, rather than adding to the glut of commercial advertising, thus relieving the corporate image of some of the negative side-effects of advertising. Contact us today to receive your own free quote for advertising-free sales and marketing leads.
Brand marketing is the process of ascertaining, developing, and finally bringing a company’s image to the marketplace. It is important to know who will represent your target market. You want to know their age, gender, and location. You also want to know the potential consumer’s spending habits, and if your target market shows brand loyalty or if they can be swayed to another brand by a promotion or special offer.
Always ask yourself what your brand can provide that no other brand can. Concentrate on your strengths. Remember to ask yourself what a potential consumer wants. Making a consumer believe that your brand is special or unique is an important part of brand marketing.
Businesses need brand marketing because it can increase sales. If a consumer knows your brand and says, “Hey, your company has a reputation for really getting things done,” then your chances of increasing sales are pretty good. Your don’t want your brand to ever be forgettable because people will not spend money for “forgettable”.
Businesses also need brand marketing because successful brands will help generate business prospects. It’s just like in high school, the popular people always get their phone calls returned and are asked to go to all the social events. The same is true for recognizable brands. If you’re in the popular crowd, you get business lunch meetings and your phone calls stay at the top of the pile.
Brand marketing that is successful will help your business fetch premium fees and pricing for your product or service. If a consumer expects top quality from your brand, he is more willing to pay more for your product or service. This will also give you a leg up over the competition.
Brand marketing can prove to be another way for your business to increase revenues.
Marketing is a concept which has existed directly for almost as long as mankind has, or at least it has existed indirectly in some form or fashion. When a product is first introduced or offered, and sometimes even before hand, someone has to want what is being offered.
In days before recorded history, someone had to get the word out about where food and shelter were available without exposing the rest of the village to danger. The ability to get this sort of information dispensed was what originally brought the concept of marketing into common usage; telling others what is available and where they can get it.
Eventually man began to live in clusters. These clusters grew into towns and municipalities, and eventually cities. Today most people don’t need to know where they can obtain food or shelter, but when they do marketing is there to answer the call.
Then there are always those things that fit outside of the food and shelter categories, but they are necessities just the same (or at least we like to think that they are). The businesses that supply the solutions for these needs still have the same old problem, “How do I get my product enough exposure to get into the hands of the people who want or need to buy it?” If a business can’t do this then it will fail, hence there needs to be a marketing plan.
Today marketing has grown in popularity. Individuals very seldom need to concern themselves with where food and shelter are available, but now they may need to get others to buy in to other important information. Overweight individuals need to know the best way to lose weight. Smokers need to know the most efficient product to help them quit smoking. The list goes on.
The basic plan should include questions such as:
Of course these are not the only questions that need to be answered, but they are a good start. Once the questions listed can be answered and you have a solid understanding of what the market will bear for your good, get the word out.
In this age of technology, there are several software programs available to assist in developing a plan. Of course the plan doesn’t have to be computerized, but it does help. Boat loads of marketing data need to be gathered and analyzed to find the theoretical value of any given marketing plan; or you could do it the old fashioned way and just answer the questions on paper.
Just like in the age of dinosaurs, your marketing plan still needs a demographic. No longer will you market to your ‘tribe’, but instead you need to find and connect with a long list of people that either require or will benefit from your products and services. Marketing Leads USA can help you gather this list. Just contact us today for a free quote.
If we consider money to be the lifeblood of a business, then consumers would be to a business what food is to the body. Though investors are important, it is the consumer who brings business revenue. It is the consumer who decides if your business is the one where he or she wants to spend their money. If the consumers stop coming to spend their money on whatever product or service your business offers, then your business will essentially starve to death.
But lets look at it another way: The consumer needs your product or service, right? He wouldn’t be here otherwise. But it is important to not forget that you need the consumer as well. Without the consumer to consume, there is no service for you to provide, nor anyone to purchase whatever products you have available. It is a symbiotic relationship, the business and the consumer both benefit from the transaction — the consumer gets whatever product or service he needs and the business gets the money to continue doing business.
The primary way to utilize consumers is to find out what the consumer wants and needs. If you are providing what is wanted and needed, you will always have consumers for whatever it is you are selling. From the consumer’s end it appears you are serving him, but when you serve the consumer, you are also serving your business.
Pay attention to what consumers of different ages and backgrounds ask for, and what they seem to respond to. Collecting information like this is to your benefit and will allow you to tailor your business to the consumer to make him happier.
A simple zip code or phone number can be a wealth of information about who is using your business. Just make sure that whatever method you use you don’t alarm or offend them.
So, to summarize — the consumer is the one who brings in the money for your business to operate. If you serve your consumers well, they will continue to utilize your products and services and your business will continue to make money. If you make sure that your business is tailored to what the consumer needs (as established through information gathered about your consumers) then you will have a successful business for a long time to come.
Marketing Leads USA can help you get a targeted list of consumers that will probably buy or subscribe to your product or service. Submit a free quote request today to learn more.
A mailing list is really just a glorified address book used by a salesperson or marketer. The list is a collection of names and addresses which can be used to distribute sales material to potential buyers. Originally, a mailing list was used to send flyers, newspapers, and magazines through the postal mail. However, with advancing popularity and use of the internet, the definition of mailing lists has expanded to include e-mail addresses.
If a business is looking to promote or advertise their services a popular technique is to send out information about their products or services to multiple recipients. A mailing list (postal or electronic) is obviously a critical tool in this process by providing a collection of potential interested individuals and their correct addresses. A mass mailing is considered productive if it brings in business to the company.
There are two types of mailings possible – mailing massive amounts of materials to a large pool of individuals or sending out a smaller amount of mail to a smaller, more selective group. A smaller amount of mail to a more selective group is a more cost-efficient way to advertise. It involves less time, money and effort and will bring back better results. The only way to ensure success is to use a quality mailing list with correct addresses to a smaller number of interested individuals.
Accurate addresses (whether physical or electronic) are a key factor in a quality mailing list. It is a waste of valuable resources to send out advertisements to a variety of recipients that never receive the mail. People frequently move and/or change their e-mail addresses. A quality mailing list needs to keep up-to-date with these ongoing changes in their inventory of potential customers.
Another key factor in determining if a mailing list is top quality is by determining how relevant your company is to the individuals on the list. If you use mailing list that has a fairly random representation of the population, you will hit all types of people in all walks of life. If your product or services are geared to college students, a 50-year-old woman will not be as valuable a potential customer as an 18-year-old boy. The best mailing list is composed of individuals who have asked to be contacted regarding products or services related to those of your company.
There are a variety of ways to obtain a quality mailing list. They can be purchased or rented from businesses who work solely to distribute mailing lists, or with a little bit of effort you can create your own quality mailing list. The first step in creating a quality mailing list is to obtain quality marketing leads for a list of business or individuals who may be interested in your product/services. Then you should at least briefly research these leads and determine their interest as well as their current address.
If you are mailing to a large company, sending the mail to the individual who is authorized to make decisions will increase the productivity of your advertising. The contact information should then be transferred into a backed up document where you keep your contact information. If the mailing is to take place in the near future, the information will probably remain correct. If you have mailings scheduled in the distant future, you should attempt to confirm the information is still current before proceeding with the mailing.
Start your mailing list campaign today by requesting a quote for a mailing list to cover your target demographic from Marketing Leads USA.
