This is a weekly diary series focused on marketing strategies and tactics. The objective is simple. Outline the basics to help somebody working on a grassroots political campaign raise money or secure votes, help a group increase awareness about their cause, or just help a small business owner who wants to market themselves more effectively.
Yesterday I asked for input on the topics I planned to write about. Well as they say, ask and you shall receive. Both the topics and order I had envisioned has been altered fairly drastically (at the end of the Diary) based on your input. More than a few asked what I meant by marketing? That question made me realize I was about to jump into talking about specific activities, without first outlining some core marketing principles that are important to say the least.
So in this Diary I will outline these core principals that will serve as the foundation for anything and everything I write about in future posts.
MARKETING COMMUNICATIONS DEFINED
Marketing Communications, or MARCOM to use industry jargon, is really a very broad umbrella phrase. Direct mail, web sites, email marketing, blogs, social networking, public relations, focus groups, print ads, and trade shows (to name a few) all fall under the marketing umbrella. In fact I'd argue that any interaction a firm has with a client or prospect is a form of marketing.
If I had to attach a definition, I'd say:
Effective marketing is about delivering the right message, to the right audience, at the right time, at the highest frequency possible.
That may sound really simple, but there is a whole lot of stuff going on within that short sentence. Lets review each point, which are interrelated, in a little more detail.
MESSAGE DEVELOPMENT
Of course, if you are going to start to market a product you need to have something you want to say. In fact the first thing you should do before undertaking any marketing activities is to develop a message. This may be the most painful and difficult part of the entire process because it requires people to make choices.
When I start talking with a new client (called sourcing) the first question I ask is what is their single most compelling message? Clients usually list at least five. They may say it is cost effective. Easy to use. Better than the competition. Good customer support. The list usually goes on and on. It is great that their product does all those things, but I just want one.
Clients list all of these various selling points cause they want to be everything to everybody. They think this is an effective approach. It isn't. Of course people may have multiple criteria for buying a product, but from a marketing point-of-view it is more effective to focus on a single message, the most important message, and pound it home non-stop.
This is even more important if you have a limited budget. It takes getting exposed to a message 5-7 times before it sinks in. So if you have five different messages you have to reach that person 25-35 times for them to all resonate. That is a pretty unrealistic objective even with a huge marketing budget.
I also ask this question, what is your single most important message, cause when they can't answer it, it tells me something very important. They most likely don't understand their target audience as well as they should.
Sidebar: There is another way to locate your single most compelling message. In political ads fear (I prefer to call it pain) is often used because it works. Ask yourself what keeps your target audience awake at night, worried, in a cold sweat? It is a pretty safe bet the benefit of your product that can solve that "pain" is your single most compelling message.
TARGET AUDIENCE
Your target audience is a person that has a need for the product you are selling. Unless you are selling air, your target audience will never be everybody, but a lot of clients seem to think that way. It is a fatal marketing mistake on two different levels.
First, it doesn't force you to promote one specific, compelling message. For example, let’s say you are selling an ultra-thin notebook computer with every advance feature. Price tag of $5,000. You could say anybody that is in the market for a new computer is within your target audience. But that isn't really true.
I am currently in the market for a new laptop, I am a gamer and power user, could spend that amount of money, but there is little chance I'd buy a $5,000 computer. Instead the target audience might actually be senior level executive that travels a lot. The message you would use to motivate them to evaluate your product is far different then what would motivate me. You need to know this.
The second problem is that specific audience’s consume different types of media, therefore how you reach them varies. To use the computer example again, running an ad on Daily Kos or in a general interest computer magazine (where I might see it) wouldn't be nearly as effective as an ad in CEO Magazine or a direct mailer to executives that have an American Express business card.
Sidebar: In almost every instance you should have more than one target audience. The message you’d want to send to a registered Democrat that has given to your campaign should be different than what you’d send to an independent voter. Just keep in mind that the more audiences you have, the more time, money, and effort is required to communicate effectively. Make sure you allocate the resources to communicate with the most important target audience effectively, before you move to a second. Do one right, don’t half-ass two or more.
TIMELINESS
There is a reason you see more ads for Vermont Teddy Bears around Mother's Day and Valentines Day. More ads for Toys R Us around Christmas. More political ads closer to an election. Even industries that are not as overtly seasonal/obvious as these tend to buy in cycles. By knowing your target audience and their buying tendencies you can focus your efforts on delivering messages when they are thinking about actually buying what you sell.
I think it is easy to understand that the best time for Dell to send me an email about their high-end, ultra-thin notebook is right before I buy a new computer, not afterwards.
Now I know a few people are going to point out to me, rightfully so, that people actually buy toys and teddy bears all year round. You’re not suggesting we only market ourselves one or two months out of the year? No, which brings us to the next set of principles.
Sidebar: Often people seem to forget sometimes the most basic solution to a problem is just to ask your target audience the question(s) you have. So if you are not sure of a certain market’s buying cycles/trends send out a survey. This could also be said for pretty much everything I’ve talked about here I might add.
REACH & FREQUENCY
It may seem like I am starting to get a little "geeky," but stick with me. These terms are both important and pretty straightforward.
At one ad agency I worked at we had a poster in the lobby that said:
Bob thought his ad was so good he only had to run it once.
I was always puzzled why that was in the lobby, cause it is kind of an inside joke about the importance of reach and frequency.
Reach: It is the number of people that could be exposed to a message. The number of subscribers to a magazine. The number of people on an email list. The number of viewers of Monday Night Football. You might have been out of town and never even read the magazine. You were busy at work and just deleted the email. Or in the bathroom during the commercial break during the football game. The ad actually reached you, you just didn’t see it.
Frequency: This just means how often you place an ad, send an email blast, or run a radio commercial. Because your Sunday paper may reach 200,000 people that doesn’t mean 200,000 people saw your ad. The more frequency you have, the more times you run the ad over the period of time, the higher chance somebody is exposed to it multiple times.
Outside of email marketing, where too high of a frequency will piss people off and cause them to unsubscribe, more is almost always better. There are rare instances, like with the FreeCreditReport.com ads (at least for me) where they seem to have reached the saturation point long ago (I got what you are selling guys), but that is pretty rare and you needs tens of millions.
Sidebar: With paid media like banners, print ads, radio spots, or TV ads if you have a limited budget it is better to run a condensed campaign, with a higher frequency over a short period of time, then a campaign with lower frequency throughout the course of an entire year. I wouldn’t suggest you spend all your money in a week, I mean a huge surge, but maybe a month or a quarter.
CONCLUSION/FINAL THOUGHTS
Now I know a few marketing professional are saying to themselves, "hey wait a second, you should have mention like a dozen other things." Agreed, I could have kept writing for many more pages.
I decided to do this series for two reasons. The first is what my former boss called mental gymnastics, or just the sheer mental exercise of doing it. The second is I hope a few people take the concepts I outline, adapt them to their own unique situation, give it a try, and see positive results.
There is a part of me that would like to show how "smart" I am. Do a "brain-dump" of everything I know about any given marketing topic. But that would be counter-productive. It would cause people eyes to glaze over. But most important of all, if I use 20,000 words to explain something, people will just assume the topic is too complex and not do anything.
And as I will say here many times, average marketing (even below average) is far better than doing nothing at all. Let the conversation begin in the comments. I'll see you back here each Monday morning around 8AM CST.
MARKETING 101 TOPICS
- Marketing 101: An Introduction To This Series (5/31)
- Web Site/Blog Development (6/8)
- Pay-Per-Click Ads (6/15)
- Email Marketing Basics (6/22)
- Public/Media Relations (7/6)
- How Do I Measure The Effectiveness Of My Marketing? (7/13)
- Interruption vs. Permission Marketing (7/20)
- Social Media: Should I Even Care? (7/27)
- Paper-based Direct Mail (8/3)
- Print Advertising Basics (8/10)
- Trade Show/Event Marketing (8/17)
- Online Webinars/Web Meetings (8/24)