Aligning your marketing objectives

- So the first part of customer acquisition as I mentioned is creating our marketing strategies. And I like to think of one where creating our marketing strategies as building blocks we're going to kind of build these different components of our marketing program so that we can come out with an actual plan at the end of the day. That's the end result. So the first step in doing this is you got to have marketing objectives. I think these are really important. Do not skip this step. You don't always have to put it in your formal business plan necessarily of exactly what your objectives are, but I want make sure that you actually know what your objectives are and this is everything starts here so I always recommend that you start with your objectives. We're going to walk you step-by-step through how to come up with how to come up with those marketing objectives as well. But basically what these objectives will do they'll define very specific things that you will do and what you're going to get out of what you'll do or i.e. the results of what you do. So everything that you do in marketing should be measured and should be attributed back to the activity that you do. That's very important marketing concept. You can waste a lot of money in marketing by not doing that so I want to make sure that's all part of our program. This is all going to feed back into financial plan at the end of the day as well. All right now let's jump in to the details of building your marketing strategies and your plan. This is going to be fun. This is one of my favorite things to do. Let's take a look at a quote first. "The purpose of a business is to create customers "who will create customers." Shiv Singh is the guy who said that and I really like that quote because if we could actually get our customers excited about our business, which is what our marketing programs are intended to do they're actually going to create customers for us. That's kind of that going viral, but we can do it in a big way. So, if your customers don't know about you there's no way that they're going to be able to buy from you. So I want to make sure that you ask this question and I want you to ask it every day and while you're building your marketing programs I want you to ask it every hour, right? Which is how are you going to create demand for your product or service? You got to keep on asking that question. How am I going to create demand? What am I going to do today to get more customers to know about me? And then ultimately will buy from me. That is so critical to your overall business. Now before we get started I actually want to go through a couple of strategies that we need to beware of. First of all we need to be aware of our target customer. Which customers are you going to be marketing to? Who's going to actually hear your message and what programs will identify, what marketing programs, can identify with that target customer? You want to make sure those are in alignment. You don't want to be marketing to a customer and their like I don't even understand what that program is or I don't identify with it or I don't go to events so why are you marketing at events? As an example. A positioning strategy you want to make sure your positioning strategy is in alignment with your marketing program to be most effective, right? Give you an example. If you're targeting an high end customer and you have a coupon program as one of your marketing promos where you give out coupons a little bit just a disconnected a high end customer isn't going to identify with coupons for your brand. Example, next thing of course is your brand. Does your brand what does your company represent? We have to understand what your company represents in order to craft the marketing programs around that. We want to make sure that your marketing programs are brand right. How about our messaging strategy? How can how can we effectively communicate, how can we send those messages to those customers via the marketing program? Because the communication that you're sending is kind of like part of the food that you're going to then dish out to all of your customers via your marketing programs. So you want to make sure that message you're communicating there is right on. Now what programs will communicate your marketing message most effectively? You also have to ask that so certain messages can be communicated better. Let me give an example. If you've got an SEM program and you've got two lines to say what you do and you've got a very complex product or service that you're trying to sell, SEM may not work. Let me give you an example. At Market Live, my company, for 20 years, we tried SEM, we spent a lot of money on SEM. We didn't spend too much money 'cause I'm kind of cheap but we tried it, we tried it again, and we tried it again and we just couldn't get it to work because what we did was very complex, enterprise-class e-commerce application software and we couldn't communicate that in two lines to get somebody to click on it to be interested in it. So it just didn't work. Next I want to make sure you consider your competition. What is your competition doing? What marketing programs are they using? We're going to go through a whole exercise about this but I want you to be thinking about it now. And how can your marketing programs be more effective than your competition? So be where they're not. That's a good strategy, we'll talk about that. And then finally I want you to understand your marketing objectives. What are the marketing objectives of each individual program and how do we make sure that we're getting the results that you've set out to get? And the programs that you select, it's going to be wildly important that you do that. So to summarize what I've been saying here is that the marketing programs that you select need to be consistent with all your other strategies. So you want to make sure that these actually go together. Now by knowing this this will inform what programs you select and how much money that you actually spend on each program. Also, how you execute these programs. So let me give you an example. Let's say that you have a business that targets a high end online customer. So a couple things that we know your target customer is online, your customer is high end. Branding is very important. So maybe using SEM is actually a good strategy but using SEM or other ads in the Wallstreet Journal, The New York Times, or CNN might attract this higher customer. That's what I mean by making your marketing programs in alignment with what your customer is. Doing offline advertising probably doesn't make a whole lot of sense for that strategy but let's take a look at the next example. Let's say you're a travel cruise company doing river cruises in the all throughout Europe. Boy that sounds nice. Now, your demographic is older. So if you have an older demographic, they're still going to respond to print advertising, catalogs in the mail, direct marketing and other travel-related publications. So by putting maybe images on Instagram, yeah they might be on Instagram or Facebook and that's not to say that older folks are not, but it may not be exactly how they consume information. But if you're talking to a millennial and you send them a catalog they're going to be what is this, why are you wasting paper and they're going to throw it away. Well actually they're going to recycle it because that's what millennials do. So we have to actually think about all of these things when we're crafting our marketing.