Working a Marketing Strategy into a New Product/Business Launch

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.