Marketing Tactics

Be systematic about marketing. It is an ongoing permanent part of your business that will define

• How your products / services are customized for your target customers (talk to clients)
• How each product / service is superior to those of your competitors (do your research)
• How your company as a whole provides better service, as illustrated through your branding, certifications, awards, and other qualifications (be honest)
• Why customers should trust you
• Other services you can extend to customers, including leads, introductions to qualified strategic partners, networking opportunities, bonuses, discounts, and knowledge.

Marketing to Build Trust

There is no culture or society that does not demand trust before they will do business. That trust may be built on faith at the beginning, but ongoing relations are based on trust. Marketing that carries deep into your company, extends consistently across your customer-base and prospects, and is reflected in your ongoing customer support, builds trust.

If the materials you send out are muddy, confused or contradictory, your customers may be getting mixed messages. A clear and consistent brand statement, backed by a style guide to define the brand for staff and suppliers, will help you deliver a consistent message.

Tips

Every company sells products or services. How can you effectively let your customers know what you offer?

• Give your products and services names that reflect the problems they solve.
• Provide a single paragraph of information that positions each product against it competition, including other things you offer
• Provide a short, bulleted list of features and a second set of optional extras and value-added features
• Add pricing and sales contact information
• Finish up with a one-liner re-affirming the solution the product or service provides.
• Add a call to action
• Touch it all up with some unique graphics.

Branding

Create branding and messaging guidelines and make sure all of your employees are intimately familiar with them.  Any one of them should be able to outline the company’s product line and services, explain why your company’s offerings are fantastic, and how they benefit clients.

Your employees should have access to your logos, fonts and colour schemes so that all of their messages are branded. They should be able to espouse the company’s mission and goals, the unique selling proposition and why this company matters. This kind of marketing goes beyond branding your business to prospects; it ensures that suppliers, buyers, and employees  all share the vision.

One of the best places to brand your company is through social media: daily blog entries and frequent chatter with interested friends and followers on Facebook and Twitter. Don’t bash people with your message but let your vision underlie everything you say. The word will get around.

Follow up with everyone who talks to you because it shows you care.

Logo Design

The visual pocket-version of your mission statement or elevator speech, your logo should reflect the style of your company through colour, shape and tag lines. More on logos.

Style Guides

Your style guide ensures everyone knows the rules regarding fonts, colours, and layouts, style, tone and spelling. Style guides should be distributed to contractors, agencies and freelancers as well as internally.

Public Relations

PR is a related aspect of sales and marketing. PR is about drawing positive attention towards your company and turning negative attention away. It is not about burying the bad, but about helping others understand what happened, when things go wrong. Most PR focuses on telling the world about a company’s great new events. Effective PR requires press releases and a press or media kit.

Communications Audit

A communication audit can uncover whether or not everyone in your company knows your key services, customer service guarantee, and mission statement. It will assess if all the messages that pass among staff or beyond your walls to customers, prospects, the community and suppliers, imply the same thing.

Communicating with Your Audience

If your audience is frazzled and worn out, they come to you for relief and solutions. The last thing they want is an overwhelming mass of information that tells them their problems are more complex than they imagined.

If your audience is feeling the pinch, they aren’t interested in services and products that claims to fix problems that they currently have under control. Maybe your product will save them money over time; right now they don’t have the money to invest.

If your audience is risk-adverse, they aren’t likely to try a new product or service just because it might improve their bottom line. They’ve heard so many promises that fell-through, that they aren’t willing to take a risk that will cost them money, time or energy, all of which are in short supply.  In their head, your promises sound like everyone else.

If your product is truly innovative, your audience is likely to be concerned that it will be superceded in a few months by an improved version or a competitors’ offer that is cheaper, faster, better.

Most people feel that they’ve heard it all before. They assume that sales people are over-selling the product and don’t really understand the needs of they buyer.

Your Reponse

• Make sure your audience understands that you understand their unique needs. This is the role of branding and the reason why sales representatives should work in industries that they know.
• Keep your message simple, short and clear. Provide a link to detailed information that they can peruse at their leisure, but keep your own messages short.
• Demonstrate the value of your product with demonstrations, free trials, and testimonials.
• Make it easy for customers to roll back if they are unhappy.
• Guarantee that you will help them take advantage of your product or help them roll back to what they had before they met you.

Where to Market

With online social media being the hot news of the past 2-3 years, many companies think they need to place their focus on social media. If you want to learn more about this, check out our page on the topic. However, before you spend resources online, you need to think through the why. Why are you marketing your company? What results are you looking for? Are you trying to sell or to brand?

Ultimately, we all have to sell if we are going to stay in business, but social media is a terrible place to make a sales pitch. Social media is about becoming friends and followers. It’s about building a social relationship with a network of people, some of whom may choose to become clients down the road. Many of them will have had numerous conversations with you before they make their first buy, and the topics you discuss could range from product inquiries to questions about your dog.

Trust

As you work your marketing communities remember:

• people using social media have a low level of trust about the information they receive.
• Although most people on social media have made recommendations and referrals though their media, overall, only 26% believe what they read/see on social media sites (Canadian Media Research Consortium (2011).
• People are more likely to trust information that comes from family or close friends.
• The rate of trust for newspapers, TV, magazines and online news services is 90%.
• People who use social media everyday have a higher level of trust: 40%.
• 75% of US consumers feel that companies don’t tell the truth in any of their advertising

In other words, if you want to get the word out about your company, product or service, through great publicity, you want to chat to reporters who write for accredited news agencies. Social media is important, but it is not enough!