Friday 16 March 2012

Choosing the best marketing techniques for your business

Waseem Saddique offers an insight into choosing the best marketing techniques amongst the hundreds on offer.

Piecing together a marketing plan and a marketing campaign represents a daunting prospect for a number of businesses. With so many ideas on the market as to what makes marketing a ‘success’, businesses often end up trying to adopt too many strategies and ultimately a marketing campaign ends up failing.

So many voices say that some techniques are a ‘must have’ whilst opposing voices say those same techniques are a waste of time and money. It’s no wonder that businesses don’t know which way to turn for advice. At present it is estimated that there are over 100 different marketing techniques available to businesses. But, how does one go about choosing the right ones for their requirements?

Waseem Saddique offers some points to consider:

First and foremost, it is vital to understand the purpose of marketing. Setting out clear goals and the results you expect from your marketing strategy and marketing campaigns will guide you to choosing the right techniques for you. There are hundreds of thousands of books, websites and other sources on marketing, but if you take the time to break them down, you will find that there are usually four key themes associated with the purposes of marketing.

These include:
·         Brand Awareness  – This is where your target audience is able to discover more about you as a company, learning about your products and services
·         Lead Generation - Encouraging your target audience to gather information from you or request a sales call with you, therefore developing a pre-sales rapport.
·         Brand Consideration – Your target audience is looking at purchasing from you, or at the very least has placed you on a shortlist of possibilities alongside your rivals
·         Direct sales – Persuading your target audience to buy directly from you

For instance, you may well use search engine advertising as a means of generating leads, however, this may not work for direct sales, particularly if your target audience does not buy using those methods.

The Target Audience

Uncovering what techniques work for your business, leads into the next thing to think about. What techniques does your particular audience tend to engage with and ultimately, what do they respond to? What’s key here is how well you’ve identified the audience you’re targeting. In some instances an audience will not purchase from a business until they understand them (i.e their awareness of the brand and relationship building). Should your audience engage in this way, look at using different marketing tactics across different themes. For example, to create brand awareness utilise public speaking, for lead generation try SEO or a free offer and finally for direct sales try e-mail marketing.

Marketing Products VS Marketing Services

If your business sells products and not services, then you need to adopt a blend of marketing techniques. Too many businesses make the mistake of thinking they can sell products and services using the same marketing techniques for each. This often ends in disaster. Waseem Saddique explains “consumers purchase services very differently to how they would buy products; it is therefore imperative that you have two distinct and unique marketing campaigns to promote products and services as separate entities.”

Overall the key things to consider are: knowing your audience, your time and financial availability, your goals and the ability to evaluate your results. With these things in place you will ultimately discover the marketing techniques that work for you and deliver the most productive results.