The main objective of marketing is to bring your business’s product/service offerings to the attention of potential customers and give them leverage over the many substitutes in the market. Many organizations who fail to comprehend the value of this tool fail in the marketplace, despite having effectively manufactured, well defined, neatly packaged and competitively priced products. In fact, the newer you are in a marketplace, the more effort you will have to put into promoting yourself in order to attract customers. However, effectively planning out just how you are going to go about this activity can be quite difficult, especially because of the countless number of options available in today’s biz world. Here are a few important things that you must keep in mind when planning your business’s promotional activities.
Identify The Target Market
For this, you must go beyond simply recognizing who your potential customers are going to be and gather information about what their unmet needs are, their buying power and whether you are the right company to fulfill those needs. Once this is done, the next step is to identify the current users who can be used as influencers to persuade new followers. Since these current clients are the easiest and least expensive to reach out to, they are highly valuable to an organization and must be looked after well.
Selecting The Right Communication Channels
As we discussed earlier, since there are so many methods of marketing today, small and medium scale businesses face a dilemma regarding which methods they are to select for their business. The type of communication channel that a company must use will depend heavily on who their customers are. For instance, in a B2B setting, it is more advisable for a company to rely on more personal forms of communication such as face to face meetings, telephone calls, video conferencing and direct e-mails to interact with their current clients and attract new ones.
However, for an enterprise such as a soft drink producer, who must deal with a much larger customer base, such direct methods will not be suitable. If you want your Brisbane based organization to gain recognition in a large marketplace fast, partner with a TV production Brisbane firm to create an effective TV advertisement that will get the job done. Also, you can use billboards, posters, flyers or advertisements on radio stations, newspapers or magazines to better match your capabilities.
A Promotional Budget
None of the plans you make will be actionable if they are not financially viable. Therefore, you must break each and every promotional cost factor down into the simplest form and assess the costs involved with them.
A few important factors that you must consider when developing a budget are the size of the firm, the promotional intensity required to effectively address the target market, the type of competition and the substitutability of the products offered. After including all such elements in the budget, the next step is to compare it with the organization’s current financial position to check if it is affordable.
