Month: July 2014

Marketing tips and tricks: Formulating your marketing strategy

Marketing tips and tricks: Formulating your marketing strategy

Last week we talked about setting your marketing objectives in other words the ‘Why’. Today we’re going to have a quick fly through formulating your marketing strategy.

Strategy is really the plan, the ‘What’, ‘Where’, ‘When’ and ‘How’ you are going to achieve your objectives. Let’s use the example of the printer from last week.

What = I’m going to target the top 5 printer resellers to promote my product, I need to offer them an incentive for example 10% commission for every individual sale or 30% for a trade sale.

When = I need the sales to start from 6th April 2013, so I need to get the programme running, resellers on board and trained, brochures and flyers distributed etc by February/March.

Where = I want an even geographical spread so my top resellers cover 5 different regions ie South West, South East, London, Midlands and North of England. Should I offer the printer for sale direct from my website too or is my site more information based?

How = How do I select the top 5 resellers? If I choose by sales generated what happens if they are all in the same region? If I choose by region what happens if I have resellers who all generate about the same amount of sales? How do I generate the materials – do I have all the info I need? Should I outsource the design or use an internal team?

Why don’t you think about your product or service and map out your ‘What’, ‘Where’, ‘When’ and ‘How’?

Now you have your marketing objective and marketing strategy in place – what come’s next?

Well it’s back to our friends the 4 or 7 P’s but this time armed with your plan and ready for action!

If you’d like to know more about Strategy planning for your business, why not drop me a line at enquiries@tadpolemarketing.co.uk or visit our website www.tadpolemarketing.co.uk

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Marketing tips and tricks: Why should you set marketing objectives?

Marketing tips and tricks: Why should you set marketing objectives?

Hello,

I hope you have had a great week.

So last week we talked about where to start with marketing and this lead us nicely into understanding the ‘Why’ behind your plans in other words setting objectives. Why is this so important? Well it’s a bit like driving a car; the tank is full of fuel, the engine’s running and your ready to go but where are you heading and why are you going there? Now imagine the car is a product, you know the sale price and the customers you are targeting but what is the end result you are looking to achieve? It might be a quick sale like a chocolate bar for immediate consumption or it might be a printer where you want to build loyalty so they buy the ink cartridges from you for the lifetime of the printer.

When setting your objectives use the acronym: SMART

S = Specific
M = Measurable
A = Achieveable
R = Realistic
T = Time related

For example an objective let’s use the example of marketing the printer:

To increase sales of the Inket Printer EX43 by 20% in the accounting period 2013-14 by using third party resellers.

This objective is Specific as it talks about the product by name, it’s Measurable as we’ve specified that we want to increase sales by 20%, it’s Achievable as we already have an established network of resellers to approach, it’s Realistic as typical growth for this type of printer is around 12-15% and it’s Time-related as we want to achieve all this in the accounting period 2013-14.

This means that all of your marketing efforts can be measured for their effectiveness. So if your resellers don’t achieve the target, you can investigate further – did they have sufficient information? Were they sufficiently trained to make the sale? What incentive were they offered?

It’s important to measure so you can make refinements along the way.

Why not try setting some marketing objectives for a product or service you work with? Ok so now we’ve looked at the ‘Why’ the objective setting, next week we’ll take a look at how to formulate your strategy.

In the meantime have a great weekend!

Tracey

 

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Pointers on where to start when marketing a product or service

Pointers on where to start when marketing a product or service

In the blog this week we’ll look at where to start when marketing your product or service. So let’s look at those cornerstones we talked about last week, the fundamentals of marketing – the marketing mix.

For a product this means what is commonly referred to as the 4 P’s:
  • Product (what are you marketing?)
  • Price (what are you selling it for?)
  • Place (where do you sell it?)
  • Promotion (how to attract your customers attention)
These are all great if you are selling a product, something physical that your customer can touch, feel and smell, a great example would be a chocolate bar. When you’ve decided which delicious treat to buy, you pay your money and walk away with it in your hand (for all of 2 minutes probably before it’s gone!). If you are offering a service, the mix alters and it becomes the 7 P’s:
  • Product
  • Price
  • Place
  • Promotion
  • People (the staff that customers interact with)
  • Process (how you service the customer)
  • Physical evidence (what can you give to make the service tangible)
The difficulty with marketing a service is that the customer cannot walk away with a physical ‘thing’. Let’s take a bank as an example of a service. The People element is the staff behind the counter dealing with your transaction, the Process is what happens when the service is performed; is it consistent? When you pay your money in does the same thing happen each time, if it doesn’t do you trust it? The Physical evidence is the cheque book, bank card, statement and branch that you visit. They make you feel confident that your money is there for you when you go to the atm. You can google the marketing mix and may get several different variations on how many P’s there are. Personally I’d recommend you stick with the two variants above, it will be much easier for you to manage. So why do we need to think about the marketing mix? Every ‘P’ plays an important role in getting your product or service to market. Tip: Why not draw up a simple table and plot against each ‘P’ what your product or service has for each element. It will help you to understand what’s happening in your company and offer you some insight into what you might be able to do differently or better to improve sales. In next week’s blog we’ll take a look at objective setting, understanding the ‘Why’ better to formulate the ‘What’, ‘When’, ‘How’ and ‘Where’. Tracy
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