Marketing Essentials: Tips
Tips for building a marketing orientation
• Persuade all employees of the need to be customer-focused. Show employees that the best thing they can do for the company and themselves is to constantly think of new ways to satisfy the firm's most profitable customers.
• Design the right rewards. Ensure that your group's performance-measurement and reward systems encourage behavior that builds long-term customer satisfaction.
• Hire strong marketing talent. Hire and retain people with substantial marketing experience and skills.
• Suggest—or develop—in-house marketing-training programs. Such programs will highlight the importance of a marketing orientation to your firm.
• Support efforts to restructure the company as a market-centered organization. The end result—a truly companywide marketing orientation—will position your firm for vital new achievements. Tips for creating an effective print ad
• Clarify the purpose of the ad. An ad's purpose drives its format and content.
• Get consumers' attention. Remember: the average consumer scans an ad in just four seconds. Make your ad as eye-catching as possible.
• State the product's or service's benefit for consumers. Your ad should clearly answer the consumer's basic question: "What's in it for me?"
• Give consumers a reason to act now. Use language such as "Sale ends Saturday" to create a sense of urgency.
• Use ad copy to your advantage. The best copy has a conversational tone; appeals to consumers' interests or concerns; and is short, positive, clear, and complete.
• Use design to your advantage. The best designs are fresh, appealing, uncomplicated, uncluttered, and practical. The ad's look and feel should support and enhance the brand image and message.
• Follow useful type-treatment guidelines. Avoid using too many different type sizes and styles. Tips for designing a powerful sales promotion
• Use sales promotions with advertising. For example, combine a price promotion with an ad emphasizing the product's features or with a point-of-purchase display. Or if you're marketing to businesses through trade shows or conventions, combine poster ads with sales-rep selling contests to get the most impact.
• Be clear about your objectives. Your goals for sales promotions will vary with your target market. If you're targeting retailers, persuade them to carry your company's new offerings, to stock more inventory, to encourage off-season buying, or to offset competitive promotions.
• Choose the appropriate promotion tools. Depending on your objectives, select the right tools. For salespeople, launch sales contests—with prizes to the winners. If you're marketing to businesses through trade shows or conventions, use publications, videos, and other audiovisual materials to generate new sales leads, meet new customers face to face, sell more to existing customers, and educate customers.
• Use sales promotions in markets of high brand dissimilarity. Sales promotions tend to attract brand switchers who look primarily for low price, good value, or premiums. You'll get more—and longer-lasting—market share if you use such incentives in markets of high brand dissimilarity.
• Distinguish between price promotions and added-value promotions. Sales promotions, with their incessant prices off, coupons, deals, and premiums, can devalue the product offering in consumers' minds. Make sure your promotions enhance your brand image.
• Pretest your sales promotion program. Use pretests (small trial runs) to determine whether the promotional tools you've chosen are appropriate, the incentive size will produce enough sales response without costing the company too much, and the presentation is efficient. Tips for evaluating sales representatives
• Analyze salespeople's annual territory marketing plans. This report puts sales reps into the role of marketing managers and profit centers. Managers can study these plans, make suggestions, and use the plans to develop sales quotas.
• Review other reporting documents from sales reps. Reports such as sales calls, expenses, new business, and lost business, can be used as raw data, from which you can extract key indicators of sales performance.
• Compare sales reps' current performance with their past performance and company averages.
• Assess performance along more subjective dimensions. For example, take stock of a sales rep's knowledge of the firm, products, customers, competitors, territory, and responsibilities.
• Gauge sales reps' professionalism. Determine whether a sales rep has a customer-oriented approach. Does he or she maintain a professional connection with the customer even after a sale?
• Assess negotiation skills. Effective salespeople need to work with customers to reach agreement on price and other terms of sales without making concessions that will hurt your company's profitability.
• Assess ability to build long-term relationships with customers. Effective sales reps demonstrate that their company has the desire and ability to serve a customers' needs in a superior way over the long run. Tips for marketing online
• Follow standards for online ads. If you decide to post an ad on the Internet, request ad requirements from the company that's selling the ad space before designing your ad.
• Use the Web as a direct-response tool. When designing a direct-response ad for the Web, make it easy for the respondent to reach you—through a click-on button, e-mail, phone, fax, and so on.
• Look for ad-space bargains. Consider hiring an ad agency or media-buying shop that can help you in your search. • Don't forget to try to make a sale through a Web ad. Give consumers this option!
• Make your own Web site irresistible and easy to use.
• Don't forget basic spelling, punctuation, grammar, and editorial standards. Tips for selecting the right marketing communications mix
• Gauge consumer readiness—and adapt your communications tools accordingly.
• Depending on how ready consumers are to respond to your marketing communications, select the right communication tools for each readiness stage.
• Tie your choice of communications tools to your product's life-cycle stage. Advertising and publicity, for example, will get you the biggest payoff in the introduction stage of a product.
• Tie your choice of tools to your company rank in the market. Market leaders derive more benefit from advertising than they do from sales promotion. Conversely, smaller competitors gain more by using sales promotion.
• Adapt your communications mix to the product market you're targeting. For example, personal selling can persuade retailers or dealers to buy more stock and display more product, and it boosts dealers' enthusiasm for the product and your company.
• Distinguish between "push" versus "pull" strategies. For example, push strategies can be effective when customers have low brand loyalty, whereas pull strategies are effective when customers have high brand loyalty.
Source Notes
Roger J. Best. Market-Based Management: Strategies for Growing Customer Value and Profitability, 2d ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 2000.
Scott P. Keller. Personal communication to the writer, October 8, 2001.
Philip Kotler. A Framework for Marketing Management. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 2001.
Philip Kotler. Marketing Management: Analysis, Planning, Implementation, and Control, 7th ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1991.
Susan Fournier, Susan Dobscha, and David Glen Mick. "Preventing the Premature Death of Relationship Marketing." Harvard Business Review, January-February 1998.
Robert Stevens, David Loudon, Bruce Wrenn, and William Warren. Marketing Planning Guide, 2d ed. Binghamton, NY: The Haworth Press, 1997.
Bruce Wrenn. Personal communications to the writer, October 1-30, 2001.
Philip Kotler. A Framework for Marketing Management. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 2001.
Polaroid Corporation. Creating Ads That Sell. Cambridge, MA: Polaroid Corporation, 1987.
Philip Kotler. A Framework for Marketing Management. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 2001.