MARKETING STRATEGY- an Introduction

Marketing strategies vary widely due to a number of factors, from budgets to type of product and service to market demographics and more. There are, however, a number of concepts that most marketing strategies have in common.

The basics of a good Marketing Plan, whether 3 pages or 30 fall into the following categories:

1. Assess the Market Situation, including threats and opportunities
2. Define your Marketing Objectives and How You Can Achieve Them
3. Budgets and How They Affect Your Plan
4. Tracking Your Successes and Failures and Adjusting Your Plan

1. Assess the Market Situation
Everyone wants to jump into a Marketing Plan without assessing some of the basics of successfully increasing and managing your brand and your business. We think that is a mistake. You can’t land on the moon if the launch pad is made out of bamboo sticks and duct tape no matter how powerful your rocket. Too often, business managers and owners fail to review and strengthen these foundational issues.

If you haven’t taken a good hard look at foundational marketing issues in a while, why not take an hour or so and examine your company as if you had never heard of it before.

a. The Foundation – Value Proposition and Branding

Whaddaydo? Also known as your value proposition, this is the classic cocktail party or elevator question. When it comes to marketing, you better be able to answer this question in 15 words or less, the message better be crystal clear, and tell the listener how your product or service benefits your customer. You don’t fix cars you provide safety and security to the car owner. FedEx doesn’t ship packages, they take the hassle out of getting stuff from here to there on time. At Sprint, we provide cellular phone service that is so clear you can hear a pin drop. At Wal-Mart we have Low Prices Every Day. What do you do? What’s the benefit that you offer? Think about it, craft it, you and your staff are going to use this every time anyone in your company has an interaction with a potential customer. It’s more than a value proposition; it’s a mindset.

I knew a mechanic that had a shop called I Care Auto Repair. What a dumb name. All the other repair shops laughed, but every time the receptionist picked up the phone she said, “I Care”. I care about your car, your problem, your safety, your cool ride. And the customer thought, “Gee, finally I found a mechanic who gives a rip.” Needless to say, the shop was a huge success and just picking the right name was about all the marketing he ever had to do.

Branding – We need to talk about branding for a minute. Your brand is the image that you convey to the public, and branding is EVERY INTERACTION YOUR COMPANY HAS WITH THE PUBLIC. This includes your logo, the sign out front, the interaction between your receptionist and people who call on the phone, your level of customer service, your ability to provide parts or services in a timely manner when people call, and …You get the idea.

A carpenter friend of mine taught me that every time you cut a piece of wood, that cut should improve the piece of wood. This means that if you have to take 3 inches off the end of a 2x4, make sure the 3 inches that you cut off is the worst part of the board, where there are knots or cracks. Similarly, every time you make a branding decision – choosing a tag line, a logo, designing a print advertisement or stationery, or recording your on-hold phone message, make sure that the decision you are about to make enhances your image or your brand.

Customer Service and Employee Relations - If you can’t do a great job with these two issues, you have a real problem. Every dollar you spend to increase your market share is going to be heavily taxed by losses of customers and employees through poor service. In the real world, the customer comes second, by the way. Check out this great book on the topic at Amazon or your favorite bookseller, The Customer Comes Second: Put Your People First and Watch 'em Kick Butt by Hal Rosenbluth and Diane McFerrin Peters. The basic theme is that if your employees are happy and motivated and empowered to help your customers, your customer service relationships will increase tremendously. Remember that the costs of acquiring a new customer are higher, by several times, than the costs of selling additional goods and services to an existing customer. If you are not a good people person, hire someone to manage these relationships for you.

Foundational Marketing Package - You need a professional package to present to the world. You need a logo, a tag line or slogan, and some printed material and unless you live in Abu Dabi or Kamchatka, you’re going to need a website. These costs are unavoidable. You aren’t going to have your daughter-in-law who won the 6th grade art prize 20 years ago design your logo and business card and then print them on tear off business cards to send out to people.

“It’s got to be pro or it just won’t go.” This is also known in the marketing world, as “When it’s great, there’s no debate”.

No one is going to take you seriously. Not retailers, not editors, not WD’s and not the consumer. So find a designer who’s logos you like, make sure your tag line is punchy and talks benefits and get some cards and whatever sales lit you need printed professionally. You don’t have to spend a fortune but the quality of the material has to look as good as whomever you’re competing against, at least! Whatever you spend on print layout, if you’re crafty can be used as design material for the website as well. Save a little money here, and make sure all of your marketing material looks consistent, same colors, same layout; you want people to start recognizing your BRAND.

By the way, unless you’re Edlebrock and people know what you do already, you might think about making your business card a mini-brochure. My business cards have four sides printed. The business card goes into some detail about what we offer. I’ve seen business cards that are like little booklets with 8 sides printed. These cards aren’t cheap, but think how many you hand out. Your banker, your insurance agent, your realtor gets one. You hand out hundreds at trade shows and trade events. They’re different. They stand out. I’m always gratified that when I hand one out, people spend a few minutes reading them. They are less expensive than printing brochures AND business cards.

Minimal Marketing Pieces for a Manufacturer

- Catalog
- Price and Application Guide (for Products)
- Packaging, Instruction sheets, etc.
- Dealer Terms
- Agreements for Reps and Dealers
- Formats for Product Releases
- Dealer Sales Programs, SPIF’s, etc
- Website
- Business Cards, Letterhead, Envelopes or Labels

Minimal Marketing Pieces for a Service Company

- Brochure
- Website
- Business Cards, Letterhead, Envelopes or Labels

By the way, as a startup, is it cheaper to print some of this at your local print shop in small quantities? No, not in terms of cost per sheet, but it may be cheaper to print some of your packaging and sales lit in-house at first, because the quantities may be small and it allows you to experiment with the look and feel of your print work.

You might get away with this for a year until you start shipping thousands of products a day. With sales programs, you will need the ability to experiment to see what works, so don’t print 5000 copies right away. Chances are you will change your print materials many times in the first 18 months so it may make sense for you to do smaller quantities and pay more per piece.

THE STONE CUTTER - Chances are this whole thing is going to take a little more time than that. Jay Levinson in Guerilla Marketing Excellence uses the analogy of a stonecutter. If you have every seen anyone cut stone you know that the Stonecutter takes a whack, turns the stone, takes a whack, turns the stone and takes another whack. It may take 50 or 100 whacks to finally break the stone. Levinson asks, “Which whack broke the stone”?

For most marketing adventures, you have to market your goods consistently until the stone breaks and let me tell you, if you have your ducks in a row on the issues we have talked about so far, the stone will break. I promise you it will take at least a year and perhaps several years, once you have a focused consistent message and invest the energy. It takes time and focus and persistence. How much time you have depends on how much of your costs you can offset via sales while this process is moving forward. You can cut the time by a huge, huge percentage if you do all this stuff right the first time.

In the early days, time after time, I have been in despair about making progress on the product and branding awareness front as I have invested my time and energy into this process and every time without fail as the months tick by, I’ve seen the stone get whacked in half and you will too. If you’re doing this right and your ducks are in a row you will succeed, so have faith and keep hitting that rock!

b. Assessing the Market Situation
What are your products and services and how do they fit the needs of your buying community? What are the options for increasing your sales? These might include selling more services to existing customers and/or expanding your customer base.

STAY TUNED! MORE TO COME!