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.

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!


6 Blogs You Should Be Following

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I am an avid reader and have been since childhood.  With the advent of technology and the explosion of content readily available and easily accessible online, I have added blogs to my daily reading lists.  I follow more blogs than what is listed here, but I thought I would keep the list short and list some of my top favorites.  I present to you the top 6 blogs that I like and think you should follow:

 

Seth Godin

“SETH GODIN is the author of 17 books that have been bestsellers around the world and have been translated into more than 35 languages. He writes about the post-industrial revolution, the way ideas spread, marketing, quitting, leadership and most of all, changing everything.”

 

Gary Vaynerchuk

“In the spring of 2009, my brother AJ and I launched VaynerMedia, a new breed of agency that would help Fortune 500 companies like GE, PepsiCo,Green Mountain Coffee, the NY Jets, and the Brooklyn Nets find their social voices and build their digital brands through micro content and other story telling actions. The idea took hold – what started as a 6-person project 4 years ago has swelled to a 250-strong team spread across the country.”

 

Small Business Marketing Blog (by Duct Tape Marketing)

“John Jantsch has been called the World’s Most Practical Small Business Expert for consistently delivering real-world, proven small business marketing ideas and strategies. His blog was chosen as a Forbes favorite for marketing and small business and his podcast, a top ten marketing show on iTunes, was called a “must listen” by Fast Company magazine.”

 

Entrepreneur.com

“Business ideas and trends from Entrepreneur Magazine. The latest news, expert advice, and growth strategies for small business owners.”

 

Jenn’s Trends in Social Media Management

“My goal in my blogs is to bring you relevant social media and business trends and discuss their applications, implications, and benefits. I will write from my perspective about the things I enjoy and use regularly. I also scour social media, forums, magazines, headlines and groups to find information that I think you will find fun, interesting and valuable. I sincerely hope that you enjoy my postings!”

 

Under30CEO

“Goal: To inspire, lead and educate the next generation to live more succesful and fulfilling lives.  Under30CEO is the leading media property for entrepreneurs, inspiring the world’s next generation of business leaders. Under30CEO features direct interviews with the most successful young people on the planet, profiles twenty-something startups, provides advice from those who have done it before, and publishes cutting edge news for the young entrepreneur.”

 

I would like to note that all of the descriptions were taken directly from their respective sites.  To make it easy to keep up with and read new content from the blogs that I follow, I use a RSS feed reader.  I used to be a user of the old Google Reader that was shut down, through a third party source, but I have migrated over to Feedly.  I can recommend Feedly as a pretty good RSS feed reader to use to follow blogs.

Finding Your Blogging Voice

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My first foray into blogging was not on this site here, for business, but on my hobby site for fun in my spare time.  I am very competitive and I turn everything into a challenge that I must conquer.  I find it helps to motivate me to accomplish things and move forward in life.  My hobby blog was no different.  I challenged myself to become a blog superstar.  To become the blog everyone wanted to read and subscribe to and in case you are wondering; no that did not happen, and no it is not the “it” blog.

I bring up that blog because that is where I found my blogging voice.  I’ve written previously about why every business should have a blog and it is something that I advise my client’s to do.  One of the objections that I hear is:  “I’m not witty/funny or know how to write eloquently/formally.”  Basically, they do not know how to find their blogging voice.  I do not think that you have to be intentionally witty or funny to blog or write in a formal style, not if that is not true to who you are and how you speak.

When I first started writing on my hobby blog site, I first tried a more formal approach.  My thought process was that I always made good grades on term papers in school and graduate school is almost entirely writing and reading.  I figured if I could make it through grad school and did well writing in school, surely I could write a few articles/posts for a website blog.  I kept it formal and I did not see much traction or success.  I do not believe that the formal writing style was the problem, but that it was not my genuine speaking voice.

With time, I became a bit lazy and the formal style dropped.  Instead, I began to write more like I talk/speak.  I started speaking to my readers instead of treating them like professors requesting my paper for a grade.  When I started doing this, I saw more traction with my blog in the form of engagement from my audience.  They answered my calls for guest post submissions, commented on posts and my traffic and subscription numbers increased.  I no longer have the time that I used to, to devote to that site (the woes of entrepreneurship), but the site continues mainly through guest blog post submissions.

I believe to find your blogging voice, you must find your actual real life voice.  How do you speak when you talk about something you are passionate about to someone in real life?  How do you explain it?  How do you give out advice and tips?  That is the same voice that should be used on your blog.  Speak to your readers and not at them.  Unless your topic is of a scientific/technical nature AND the audience that will be reading the information needs to consume the information in a formal way, use your natural voice.

WordPress is “Easy,” is Relative to Your Experience

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I love the WordPress platform for building and maintaining websites.  Lots of web designers, entrepreneurs and bloggers love WordPress as well because it’s so “easy.”  When working with clients and explaining WordPress to them, I have branded it as “easy” to use and learn as well.  However, I have begun to realize that “easy” is relative and WordPress may not be “easy” to learn or maintain for everyone.

WordPress is “easy” to me for a variety of reasons.  One, I no longer have to hand code a full site.  Gone are the days of me designing websites based on what I knew I could actually code and make function.  I went to school for graphic design and later went back for a MBA in marketing, but all of my web design skills and knowledge are self-taught.  I am admittedly more right brain than left and the left brain is what sees art and music in all of those lines of code, styling, hooks and calls.  WordPress came along and made it “easy” because I can use something existing as a base to build off of.  Instead of starting from scratch, I can use my coding skills to customize, tweak, tear apart and put back together a site that is unique in look to my client and gives them the functionality they need.  Compared to what I had to do before, WordPress is “easy.”

Another reason is that maintaining what I have built is much simpler and no longer requires the expertise of a client’s webmaster (does that term still exist).  Before WordPress, if a client needed a change or update made, they would have to come back to me to modify the code.  Now the interface looks similar to Microsoft Word although the WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor is not quite so WYSIWYG.  Thus, making WordPress “easy” to maintain and update, but again; this is all relative to my experience and knowing what it used to be like.

For someone that is entirely new to websites and is looking to have one made for their business, WordPress may not seem so “easy.”  Especially when they have an interface that is similar to Microsoft Word, but does not really act or function like Microsoft Word.  It can be downright frustrating.  WordPress also requires a bit of technical savvy to really get a handle on how things work on the back-end and how that all correlates to what is seen on the front-end.

While it is great to be able to say what it used to be like and how hard that was in comparison to WordPress today, for a client that needs a business site, it is all irrelevant.  Today they need a site and today they need to be able to maintain it.  If I told them that it would be “easy” with WordPress, then that is what it needs to be.  For that reason, I no longer tout WordPress as an “easy” solution, because “easy” is relative.