Imagine
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Imagine if the situation was totally opposite, smiles on the face of the boss to his subordinates, like to his clients, happy employees, this is already an insurance that what you are consuming is quality. Will they come back next time?
This same scenario can be demonstrated anywhere, even in back offices. If you ignore it, the costumers sense it when things aren’t good enough, only by paying close attention to the results, which are what they get.
We know that when it comes to the way men and women shop; it's different. Men waltz into a store to gather what they came for while women will take the time to browse and explore the new products that have been introduced in the isles. The same is true when it comes to the online behavior of men and women; gender stereotypes apply.
Effective marketing is about getting our products or services in front of the consumer where they will see it and be attracted to it. If we take the time to understand the way our consumers use the internet it enables us to ensure that they see it online when they are participating in their usual activities.
Take a few moments to learn how both men and women use the internet and how that information can help you in positioning your product or service and in return help you to increase your conversions. You may just find out why you are not selling any of your products or services online.Are you tired of hearing about Charlie Sheen? Last week I attended a conference and I will tell you that the name "Charlie Sheen" was mentioned way too many times, to the point the jokes got old, but we must acknowledge he has the buzz going.
There was even an online virus (malware) that was spread through Facebook using the hook that Charlie Sheen had been found dead in his home. Obviously this was a hoax, but it got people to click. When users would click the link it would take them to a fake You-Tube clone page and if you clicked on any link on that page the virus was spread throughout your Facebook friends.
What can we learn from Charlie Sheen when it comes to public relations? I mean after all what company wouldn't love the buzz that he is receiving.
As Guy explains in his recent article when professional athletes, politicians or rock stars self-destruct, people naturally pay attention to the celebrity train wreck.
Charlie Sheen's fiery wreckage certainly has caught our attention. He did things different -- he didn't go into hiding or rehab. He took control of his own publicity and media appearance. He created internet memes at will. But he didn't have a plan, or a purpose, and heavy exposure has quickly turned into overexposure and media fatigue.
But as a small business owner, you don't have time to devise complex marketing strategies for your products. Instead, you can tap into a few simple strategies that have already proven their worth.
Many small business owners mistakenly confuse marketing strategies with ad campaigns. A marketing strategy is a plan or an approach for marketing your products and services. An ad campaign, on the other hand, is the means by which your marketing strategy is accomplished. Your objective is to tie your advertising efforts into a comprehensive marketing strategy that has carefully designed to attract attention in the marketplace.
Some marketing strategies are created for the purpose of capturing a certain segment of the market, but the majority of small business strategies are more generic in nature. Even so, it's important to understand what your strategy is trying to achieve.
Boost Consumer Confidence
Consumers are fickle lot and are frequently hesitant to buy a product they know little about. If your business or products are new to the area, you could create a marketing campaign that emphasizes the quality and value of your products. The resulting boost in consumer confidence will likely translate into more action at the cash register.
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Create Awareness
Another way to spark interest for your products is to conduct a campaign designed to promote your products in as many ways as possible. In other words, your marketing strategy could be to create buzz by blanketing the local airwaves, print space, and other advertising mediums with your name, logo, and products. Increased awareness will definitely bring more people into your store, but it also costs money, so you should be prepared to increase your advertising budget to pull it off.
Leverage Emotions
No matter what they say, the buying decision is emotional for many customers. Large corporations spend millions of dollars playing on their customers' emotions and what works for them, can work for you, too. The key is to create a campaign that makes consumers feel themselves, your company, and the decision to buy your products.
Overcome Objections
The task of overcoming a buyer's objections is usually assigned to the sales team. However, a well-crafted marketing campaign can work toward overcoming your customers' buying obstacles before they walk in the door. A marketing strategy that emphasizes warranties, testimonials, endorsements, and other positive reinforcement devices can not only make the buying decision easier for existing customers, but also attract new customers who hadn't previously considered buying from your business.
Set a Deadline
Why do so many ads emphasize the date the sale ends? Because people respond to deadlines. Marketing strategies designed around the idea of limited supplies, temporary price reductions, or other mechanisms that create a sense of urgency can provide a quick influx of customers and can potentially jumpstart a business suffering from a diminished customer base.
Marketing Strategy
The marketing concept of building an organization around the profitable satisfaction of customer needs has helped firms to achieve success in high-growth, moderately competitive markets. However, to be successful in markets in which economic growth has leveled and in which there exist many competitors who follow the marketing concept, a well-developed marketing strategy is required. Such a strategy considers a portfolio of products and takes into account the anticipated moves of competitors in the market.
The Case of Barco
In late 1989, Barco N.V.'s projection systems division was faced with Sony's surprise introduction of a better graphics projector. Barco had been perceived as a leader, introducing high quality products first and targeting a niche market that was willing to pay a higher price. Being a smaller company, Barco could not compete on price, so it traditionally pursued a skimming strategy in the graphics projector market, where it had a 55% market share of the small market. Barco's overall market share for all types of projectors was only 4%.
Even though Barco's market was mainly in graphics projectors, the company had not introduced a new graphics projector in over two years. Instead, it was spending a large portion of its R&D budget on video projector products. However, video projectors were not Barco's market.
Barco's engineers had been working long hours on their new projector that would not be as good as Sony's. Some people thought they should not stop work on that product since the engineers' morale would suffer after being told how important it was to work hard to get the product out. However, even considering the morale of the product team, it would not have been a good idea to introduce a product that was inferior to that of Sony. Barco wisely stopped working on the inferior product and put a major effort in developing a projector that outperformed Sony's.
The Barco case illustrates several marketing strategy concepts:
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Price / Selling Effort Strategies: A firm that follows a skimming strategy seeks to be the first to introduce a product with very good performance, selling it to the innovator market segment and charging a premium price for it. It makes as much profit as possible, then moves on when the competition arrives. The price is likely to fall over time as competition is encountered. Such a skimming strategy contrasts with a penetrating strategy, which seeks to gain market share by sacrificing short-term profits, and increasing the price over time as market share is gained.
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Competitors have certain strengths and abilities. To succeed, a firm must leverage its own unique abilities.
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A firm should prepare defensive strategies before potential threats arrive. If the competition surprises a firm with the introduction of a vastly superior product, the firm should resist the temptation to proceed with its mediocre product. A firm never should introduce a product that is obsolete when it hits the market.
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The competition's probable response to a firm's actions should be considered carefully.
Marketing Research for Strategic Decision Making
The two most common uses of marketing research are for diagnostic analysis to understand the market and the firm's current performance, and opportunity analysis to define any unexploited opportunities for growth. Marketing research studies include consumer studies, distribution studies, semantic scaling, multidimensional scaling, intelligence studies, projections, and conjoint analysis. A few of these are outlined below.
* Semantic scaling: a very simple rating of how consumers perceive the physical attributes of a product, and what the ideal values of those attributes would be. Semantic scaling is not very accurate since the consumers are polled according to an ordinal ranking so mathematical averaging is not possible. For example, 8 is not necessarily twice as much as 4 in an ordinal ranking system. Furthermore, each person uses the scale differently.
* Multidimensional scaling (MDS) addresses the problems associated with semantic scaling by polling the consumer for pair-wise comparisons between products or between one product and the ideal. The assumption is that while people cannot report reliably which attributes drive their choices, they can report perceptions of similarities between brands. However, MDS analyses do not indicate the relative importance between attributes.
* Conjoint analysis infers the relative importance of attributes by presenting consumers with a set of features of two hypothetical products and asking them which product they prefer. This question is repeated over several sets of attribute values. The results allow one to predict which attributes are the more important, the combination of attribute values that is the most preferred. From this information, the expected market share of a given design can be estimated.