An adventurous spirit and an irrepressible ingenuity!

After presenting at a recent seminar, in the Q&A session, one person asked a great question; "How can I make sure that I can run a successful and reusable marketing campaign?"

These are the 5 elements that I shared that I consider essential for any campaign to stand a chance of success.

In my opinion, the 5 essential elements are:

1. Define your Market Dominating Position (MDP)
2. Create an effective sales offer
3. Avoid the marketing pitfalls
4. Use a world-class marketing perspective
5. Get results!

Simple! We’ll go through each one of these, so you can see exactly how to use them and how they all affect the overall outcome of your marketing campaign. Once you have these basics down, you can use them over and over again.

1. Define your Market Dominating Proposition (MDP)

Most marketing I see is about what you do, what you sell, how you operate!

Take the time to ask yourself some questions from the perspective of the customers/clients. What would it take to get your attention? What needs do you have that need to be met? What are the promises you want fulfilled?

Once you know the answers to these questions you can start putting together a plan to meet these needs. Then take a look at what, if any, MDP your competitors are using to help you develop your own MDP. Your MDP is what you are “promising” your customers/clients. This is what’s going to set you apart from your competition - you will most certainly need to specialise and you may also need to innovate!

2. Put an effective sales offer to work

To develop an effective sales plan, you need to follow a number of steps:

• Put together a headline that interrupts your prospect and gets immediate attention.
• Share benefits of your products/services but from the customers’ perspective.
• Identify the specific needs met by your products/services.
• Make it easy to do business with you by offering no-risk guarantees.
• Share your specific sales proposition.
• Walk your customers/clients through how they should respond and act.
• Motivate with a clear, striking and no-risk call to action.

What this all means is, you need to put together what makes your products/services special and compel customers to buy them. But, remember, if they don’t feel like they NEED your product, they won’t buy. You also need to plan for the fact that they may need to buy but not yet. You may, therefore, need to answer a question, solve a problem or even feed an obsession.

You need to provide them with all the information they need to make an informed and confident decision. Buyer’s remorse is one of the worst things that can happen.

3. Avoid the marketing pitfalls

There are a number of major marketing pitfalls that many businesses fall into and you should avoid:

• Ignore market testing and push on with a poorly researched and inaccurate plan.
• Offer an incomplete case, or reasons, throughout the marketing plan.
• Failure to understand the true needs of prospective customers/clients.
• Failing to diversify the marketing options.

This list is not exhaustive, but these are all areas to avoid. If you’ve been working through these blog articles, avoiding these pitfalls should be easy and natural.

4. Use a world-class marketing perspective

Having a world-class marketing perspective is important, especially if you want to attract customers/clients from all over the world. You can do this a number of different techniques and activities:

1. Benchmark against the best-in-class marketing companies. As an example, I have always viewed Guinness as one of the best examples of powerful and compelling marketing that has kept a 258 year old brand fresh and exciting!
2. Linked to this, watch for high quality marketing everywhere you can find and keep a file for future ideas to consider.Always keep an Ideas Journal and scribble down any innovative ideas that occur to you or that you see that you might be able to replicate.
3. Encourage your marketing department, marketing partner or yourself, to measure everything and then to try new things and dump the things that aren’t working.
4. Continuously test market your marketing activity. This is the only way to stay successful and know what’s working and, more importantly, what’s not.
5. Try finding your own marketing as if you were a prospect and then order from your own company under a different name and analyse the process of ordering, shipping, online store, customer service and the product itself. This may show you areas for improvement in the customer experience.
6. When out in public, watch how consumers or business customers behave in different situations and how they consider their purchases. Look for how this might apply to your own business.
7. Take the opportunity to step down a notch or two and work on the front lines with your sales and customer service staff.
8. Continuously acknowledge hard work from your staff and vendors - not just the successful results. Everyone works better when they feel appreciated.
9. Seek out and always listen to feedback from employees and customers. Remember, all feedback is a gift!
10. Offer more relevant and engaging information in your marketing than anyone else. The more information you offer, the more products/services you’ll sell.
11. A great marketing plan can only get better. Continue to fine tune and refine your marketing plan based on testing results and feedback.
12. Be classy in your marketing. Make sure your marketing and advertising fits your company image, products/service and quality.
13. Focus on what you say and how you say it, don't worry so much about where you say it. The best marketing ideas, if implemented effectively, turn into the best marketing naturally.
14. Develop all your ads, campaigns and sales materials as if you were wanting to include everything you've done into a portfolio of your work. Never produce a piece of marketing that you are not proud of!

By using these techniques you can put your name out there to the world and become one of the top brands in your chosen industry.

5. Get results!

The last area to talk about is the best-satisfied customers. If your customers aren’t satisfied, you’ve wasted all your marketing resources and all chance of positive word-of-mouth advertising. You can satisfy your customers by:

• Providing quality products/services
• Providing high quality customer service
• Providing a low-pressure, highly informative sales experience
• Taking all the risk away with a great guarantee

As an additional benefit, here's a couple of simple techniques that work every time to generate more business and create more customer engagement:

• Build your database with a contest.
• Do regular mailings with sales, discounts, or other incentives.
• Find other creative ways to keep your current customers coming back for more.

Guinness will tell you that "It takes adventurous spirit and irrepressible ingenuity to do things the Guinness® way" - perhaps if you approach your marketing with an adventurous spirit and an irrepressible ingenuity, then your brand will be standing proud in 258 years time!

Cheers

Steve

The Imora Marketing Academy

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