Working a Marketing Strategy into a New Product/Business Launch

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Yesterday, I talked about why marketing is important and today I will give you some ideas for how to work a marketing strategy into a new product or business launch.

 

Step 1 – Research

Before you can determine where you should market and how to market your product or business, you first have to determine, who the customer is.  You want to market and get your product/business in front of the person that is most likely to buy.  While you, as the product/business creator think that your product/business is awesome, you might not actually be the ideal customer for it.  You cannot build your marketing strategy around what would appeal to you, if you are not the target demographic.

For example, while discussing a client’s marketing strategy a few months back, I told them this exact thing.  They would not be their own customer; not for what we were marketing. This is not because they did not like the product or would not use the product, but because of the method of purchase.  We were working on marketing the online store portion of their business.  The client would purchase a product like the ones they are selling, but from a brick and mortar entity.  The client’s online shopper has different behaviors from the client’s other patrons.  Therefore, the strategy needed to be different to market the online store.

Knowing who the customer is will help you focus the strategy to appeal to that specific group of customers.  Targeting your message and strategy will increase the potential for sales.

 

Step 2 – Formulate A Plan

Like with anything you have to formulate a plan.  After all, that is what the word strategy means – a plan.  Use the information that you have learned from doing the marketing research to pinpoint where you should be marketing.  Would your marketing efforts pay off more offline or online?  Print advertisements?  Guerrilla marketing tactics?  Social media marketing?  Paid television or radio spots?

The research should tell you what your customer likes, what their habits are, whether they spend a lot of time online and how they spend that time online.  If your customer is not very active on social media, you do not need to invest a lot of time, money and energy in social media marketing from the start.  For example, a business associate had an insurance company that focused on health insurance options for senior citizens.  Their primary clients were senior citizens and their secondary client were the senior’s children that made the decision for them.  Offline marketing efforts, like ad placements in periodicals, were more effective than online efforts.  Both offline and online efforts had to have separate strategies because the demographic for each effort was very different.  The primary target was not online, but the secondary target was semi-active online.

 

Step 3 – Costing/Estimating

Once you have a plan for where and how you are going to market the product/business, you have to figure out how much it is all going to cost you.  This will become your marketing budget.

If you are using an agency for the execution of your strategy, get a quote.  Get several quotes and compare them to see which is the best agency for you to use.  You can typically save some money by using freelancers, but it may involve a little more work on your part to manage all of it.  Everyone that an agency will use in-house, you can find a freelance counterpart for.  There are freelance illustrators, copywriters, marketing consultants, brand managers, content managers, graphic designers, web designers, PR professionals, etc.  If the job position exists, there is a freelance professional that will fit the bill.  You could ideally build your own team/network of freelancers to work with.  Freelancers are often used to working or collaborating with other freelancers on projects.  Just make sure to get a quote from each.  It may be helpful to write up the project’s details, scope and what will be needed and done to present to the freelancers.  We tend to refer to this as a project or creative brief.  It will be easier for a freelancer to provide you with an accurate quote if they are furnished with a brief.

 

Step 4 – Execution

Now that you know who the ideal customer is, you know what your strategy will be and you have your team ready to make it happen; it is now time to pull the trigger and execute it.

While the strategy is in place and being executed, you will need to monitor things.  You want to make sure that you are seeing the results that you expected to see and if not, you need to analyze the numbers/results and try to determine why.  It may be because a portion of the strategy is not being executed properly, trends or technology changed or a current event has changed the attitudes/views of your target demographic.  The important thing is to stay diligent in monitoring the strategy and quickly make changes when needed.

Why is Marketing Important?

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The simple answer to why marketing is important, is that if no one knows that you exist, you do not really exist.  You can have the greatest product in the world, but if on one knows about it, it will not sell.  It is not enough to have a great idea or product.  It is not enough to have the latest and greatest infrastructure and equipment.  It is not enough to have a killer business model.  If you do not adequately invest and plan a marketing strategy to go along with your “awesome” business, it will not do well.

Yes, marketing costs money, but so does the business’ equipment, supplies, infrastructure, manpower, etc.  Marketing in my opinion, is a necessary business expense that should hold just as much importance and weight within an organization as inventory and supplies.  It is a necessity.  The statement that “you have to spend money, to make money,” is true.  However, most businesses take this to mean that statement applies to everything else, but marketing.  Often times, marketing is the last thing that a business thinks about or plans for when starting up.  I have heard it said plenty of times that a business needs to make money, before they can invest in marketing.  I disagree with this statement.  I believe that a business would actually make more money if they adequately planned and invested in their marketing efforts.

I believe that if you have a great product or service and you combine it with a great marketing strategy, the ROI is great.  Marketing is not just design (graphic, web, etc); it is research to determine who that customer is and how to target them.  Knowing who would be likely to buy your product or use your service, helps you determine where you should be marketing and how you should speak to them.  Marketing is messaging.  How does that target customer like to be spoken to?  Long form copy?  Bullet points?  Visual representations of ideas and messages?  Interactively?  Marketing is an experience created for the customer.  How do they like to engage with you?  Online?  Offline?  Copywriters, graphic designers, web designers and social media strategists, all help to convey this information in a way that will appeal to that customer.  It can get costly, but that cost can equate to higher profits and momentum to propel a business forward.

Marketing is very important if you want to be very successful.

Creating A Custom Short Link

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Over the Thanksgiving holiday break when I was supposed to be “not working,” I worked. I did not do anything stressful or work for clients, but I did do some “internal,” as I call it, work. For a while, I have been wanting to create a custom short link. I share a lot of content on social media networks and here on my blog. I primarily use goo.gl (Google Link Shortener) and bit.ly (bitly.com), but I had noticed a couple years ago that other businesses were using custom links. Yes, it took me almost two years to finally do this and I can see you shaking your heads. Please stop. Because HostGator was running Black Friday/Cyber Monday deals that included domain name purchases/registration, I decided to go ahead and get this done. Finally.

If you have wondered how to create a custom short link to share content with, here is what I did to do so:

Bitly offers the capability to use a custom domain name to create short links. Instead of the standard bit.ly/xx12345, you can use cust.om/xx12345. To do this, you must first have a domain name that is not being used for anything else (can be a sub domain). It can also only be 15 characters long, to include the “.” I used Domai.nr, to get suggestions and search for a short domain name to use. Most of the variations of “Colleen Eakins Design” that I was interested in, were already taken, so I decided to just go with my name. In the end, I chose “colleeneakns.me”

The next step, was to go to Bitly and enter the new domain name in as a custom link. You can find this by logging into your Bitly account, clicking on “settings” and then clicking on the “advanced” tab. Once I had it entered, I needed to change my A record for the new domain name to point to Bitly. I can admit that this was a little tricky with HostGator. I must say, that it was easier to make these types of changes with my domain names that I still have under GoDaddy. Minus two points for HostGator. Once that was done and verified with Bitly, I was good to go and geeked to have my “vanity” custom short link. I probably frivolously shared content that day, just so that I could ogle my own link.

Here are a couple [frivolous] links that I found helpful and one irrelevant one:

Bitly Support Page – http://colleeneakns.me/1eJyiOF
Mashable Article – http://colleeneakns.me/1cSxG7i
CED on Facebook – http://colleeneakns.me/1cdQ3W2

Confession: I Don’t Always Take My Own Advice

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It’s confession time.  Hi, my name is Colleen and I am guilty of not [always] taking my own advice.  Wait, before you stone me, hear me out and listen to my excuse.  I often advise clients, family and friends that pick my brain on different ways to market their business and position/brand themselves.  A lot of the advisement that I give, I do not actually do myself.  I am pro marketing plans and strategy.  I am pro digital marketing.  I am pro succinct marketing messages.  I am pro everything that goes into creating a great marketing strategy and executing it.  However, my own strategy is slightly shotgun, which is exactly what I preach against.  Does that make me a hypocrite?  Probably.

Here is my excuse:

I am just plain, plum, too busy.  My brain is too full and consumed with coming up with the best ideas, strategies, graphics, layout, logos, etc for clients.  I put a lot of energy and thought into the work that I do for my clients.  As, I tell them, I consider myself to be a part of their team and everything I design, every idea I present, is thought out based on where they are trying to go with their business and what the market and my gut are telling me would be best.  There just is not a lot of brain power left to think and plot my own strategies and what is left is often picked out for my friends and family.  I do not mind one bit, helping friends and family, because I truly want to see them succeed as well.

At the end of the day, there just is not enough gas in the tank for me to plan, evaluate and execute a great strategy of my own.  I liken it to hairdressers that have magical hands and execute the best haircuts and hairstyles, but look like they have a bird’s nest sitting on their own head.  Yeah, it’s kind of like that for me.

Business: Feast and Famine

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Every business has seasonal periods that are slower or busier than usual.  With large companies, you tend to hear about lay-offs or seasonal/temporary hires during their high and low seasons.  For them, the economic affect is felt, but not like it is felt in a small business.  If you have less than 10 employees, or you are the only employee, a lay-off during a slow period just is not feasible.  I often find that new business owner’s, or those looking to start a business of their own, are not aware of the “feast and famine” aspect of owning a business.  It can vary by industry and business type and what one person experiences with their business, may not be the same exact thing someone else will face.  However, there will in my opinion and experience, be times when business will be slower than other times.

“Feast and Famine” simply means that there will be times of Feast, when business will be booming, busy, extremely profitable, etc.; and there will be times of Famine, when business is slow, and for some, non-existent.  A seasonal business like a tax preparer, will experience the vast majority of their business income during the tax season and little to no business outside of that bracket.  A retailer, may see spikes of feast in their business around holidays and dips at other times of the year.  I think it is important to plan for these peaks and lows if you are just starting out and look for ways to capitalize on your high seasons to help compensate for your low seasons/peak.

I was fortunate enough to learn when those high and low peaks would typically occur for me before I went full-time with my freelance business.  What I do now, as a freelancer, is the same thing I did in Corporate America.  I also freelanced part-time, on the side while I was in Corporate America and I saw that my slow downs occurred around the same time as slow downs occurred at my day job.  My day job also helped me determine some of the reasons why those slow downs occurred.  Marketing budgets were almost depleted, sales were in decline, taxes were due, etc., I took note of those things.

If you have not already started your business venture, do some research to see if you can find out when those peaks and lows may happen.  It will help prepare you for those times, so that you can weather through them.  Last year, I filmed a short video with tips for getting through slow periods.  Hopefully, this may be of some help!