branding

Making your marketing tick

The pressure is on.

How do you optimize your minimized dollars, eliminate stale marketing efforts, and expand your outreach to prospects? 

Focusing on what can be achieved quickly and by leveraging your existing marketing assets. You might be surprised at the results if you focus your efforts on just a few key components. 

Refine your messaging

Messaging is key in pinpointing who you are and what you do. Don’t leave it to your customers to guess. It should be clearly defined and communicated over and over again by every level and division in your organization. Mixed messages equal confused customers, and confused customers don’t trust you. Confused customers go somewhere else to buy.

You can best develop your message by defining your competitive advantage. Ask yourself “Why us?”  Then massage your existing branded messages. Once you have that down, your confidence in approaching the marketplace increases, and you can fire away at getting your message out. 

Be relevant to your customers

Customers have too many choices. Therefore, it’s important to figure out a way to relate directly to your customers. Otherwise, you find that you are just trying to shout more loudly than your competition.

Conduct research. Ask existing customers what is most important in their buying decisions. What are they looking for? Second, define your offerings and messaging to meet their interests. When you have the agility to adjust marketing messages and send out targeted, relevant communication, you will see good results. Continually make these changes as you collect and process feedback from your customers. Third, refine your offer. Ask again, what will draw my customers in?  Keep in mind that it’s not about you and your message, it’s about them and how you can help them. Finally, empower your customers with actionable information such as a simple paper to download, an interesting question or survey, or an offer or special that they can inquire about.

Relevant communication, produced quickly, is a key factor behind high-impact marketing.  It’s more efficient and productive, and your customers just might be able to hear what you are trying to say to them.

Leverage technology to grow new relationships

By incorporating social marketing and all that new technology has to offer, you can develop quick and effective tactics that are very customer-centric.  Examine how you can rely on online communities and social networks to reach out to my existing and prospective customers. A simple outreach strategy that involves promotion of your brand, services and intellectual capital can be extended to the online audience.  It will amplify your marketing efforts if you can engage these audiences in your online communication and open up new ways for them to comment or participate. They will get to know you, and you will get to know them as well.  Then, it becomes simple to continually interact and communicate with this new and expanding audience.

Leveraging technology is one of the best ways to rapidly expand your network. Continually consider new ways to grow your connections and test your ideas with targeted groups. What might catch their attention and draw them in? What is working, and what is not? Be sure to measure everything you try out.

Make it personal

Business people receive an unmanageable number of marketing messages daily.  They come from the media, the Internet, email, cell phones, and their Blackberrys and iPhones. Technology is a huge distraction from communicating directly with the most important people. Building personal relationships will always prevail in doing business. Why did they pick you?  The most valuable customers will probably say because they know you and trust you.

So, how can you be effective in breaking through all this clutter? Develop a campaign driven by one-to-one communication centered on personal, targeted outreach.  For example, develop personalized print materials such as a simple letter, and invest in personal emails and follow up phone calls.  

The two primary end-goals are to engage your customers in your business and grow your network of prospects. You can effectively do so by making your message and offerings clear, responding to their needs, and encouraging them to interact with you in a variety of ways. The jackpot is the developing a growing number of personal business relationships.  That, will keep your marketing ticking.

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