 Marketing Strategy
A marketing strategy is a generic term to describe your overall advertising & marketing methods. It encompasses the marketing research & analyses, market testing, campaigns, branding, tactics and more. Your marketing strategy is arguably one of the most important aspects of your marketing efforts because it brings together all of the elements of advertising & marketing to create a cohesive, effective, customer-building effort. There are 6 main elements to a proper marketing strategy including:
Competitive Research & Market Testing – Before any marketing efforts can even be thought about, comprehensive research and market testing should be performed. Competitive research is conducted so that you can not only see what your competitors are doing so you can stand out but so that you can learn from their mistakes. If they spent a small fortune on television commercials and did not get the results they wanted, you can determine what they did wrong and either correct it or avoid that media altogether saving yourself the money you may have spent on an effort that doesn’t work. When doing competitive research it is important to ask what your competitors have done for marketing, where are they advertising, did it work, who are they targeting, how is your offering better or different? In order to get the most out of your competitive research, you need a team of experienced professionals who know how to go about finding the answers to these and other essential questions as well as put the results of that research together into an effective, easy-to-read format. After all, how good is research that you can’t understand or pass along to your staff?
Marketing Testing is also essential to determine who you need to market to. If you are selling steaks, you wouldn’t want to market to vegetarians, for example. Sometimes, the target market is even smaller or your target market could be virtually everyone. Once you have narrowed down the appropriate target market, you need to do further research and testing to discover what the best way to position yourself is. This is done through group studies, interviews, subject tests, surveys and more. Most business owners don’t have the time to do this type of research and testing and many in-house marketing coordinators don’t have the experience and training necessary. We offer the broadest range of market research and testing available and can conduct it, worldwide, nationwide or locally. In addition, you’ll get the results you need in easy to understand formats so that you can use the results to get optimal results.
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Creation of a Marketing Plan – Once the competitive research and market testing has been completed; the next step is creating your Marketing Plan. Your marketing plan is just as important as any business plan and many times is a comprehensive part of the business plan. However, to create an effective marketing plan you have to consider several key issues:
- The results of your Competitive Research & Market Testing
- How much you want your business to grow in the next weeks, months & years
- What is your marketing budget
- What type of marketing you want to do (i.e., print, internet, media, etc.)
- What marketing tactics you want to do
- How your going to analyze your marketing efforts
Your marketing plan is your map to organizing and producing your marketing efforts for the best possible results. Without a clear, concise, easy-to-follow map it is almost assured that you are going to get lost. In addition, your map should be as detailed as possible and should always and it takes someone who knows the ins and outs of marketing to create an effective marketing plan. At IEV Media, we have the understanding, know-how and time to create a valuable, comprehensive marketing plan that you can understand and pass along to your employees. In addition, your marketing plan will be created using your input, your budget and your goals; we’ll just give you the tools you need to make your business a success.
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Branding & Positioning – Branding and positioning are both extremely important elements of any marketing strategy and can be achieved by any business no matter how large or small. Branding, simply put, is coordinating all of your advertising & marketing efforts in such a way that consumers know that it is your company and/or product that they are seeing. You could have the most beautiful, eye-catching, attention-grabbing, creative, descriptive pieces possible but without branding they don’t mean squat. The average consumer needs to see your company and/or offering at least 3 times before they will buy:
- The first time they see your piece they dismiss it completely.
- The second time they recognize it as something they may have seen before and then dismiss it.
- The third time they see it they recognize it and think wow I have seen this company/product/service “everywhere” so it must be something worthwhile. So then they read it, consider it and possibly even buy it.
When you hire a freelance designer, they don’t think about your overall strategy, branding or positioning. In fact, most of the time they are only thinking about how “cool” or “trendy” the piece looks or how well it will look in their portfolio. A freelance artist is just that, an artist.
Positioning not only refers to where your product or service is being offered but also how your company is perceived by the consumer and where you rank with your competitors. Do you offer the best product or service, how do you want to position your product, who do you want to market to, why should they buy your service, what makes you better or different than your competitors? These are just a few of the questions that are answered by proper positioning.
You need a team of professionals who actually care about how well each and every marketing piece does for your company. That’s what you get when you hire IEV Media. We not only care about how well each piece does for you, we look at the overall picture to ensure that your company is getting the most out of your advertising dollar by developing a memorable, profit-building brand as well as ensuring your company & offering are positioned in the right places.
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Production – Once you have your research done, your marketing plan written and your positioning decided, its time to put it all together into actual marketing & advertising pieces. Whether you have decided to stick with the standard print campaigns, want to break into the internet or want to try a little of everything, you need an expert team to develop creative, profitable ideas and to bring those ideas into reality.
In order to use an in-house staff to handle your production, you’d have to hire, at a minimum, a team of designers, copywriters, proof readers, a marketing coordinator and an art director just to handle your “print campaigns” not to mention the contacts necessary to turn the artwork into physical pieces (i.e., gang and/or custom printers, specialty printers, magazines, newspapers, trade show coordinators, etc). If you want to expand to Internet marketing or media (such as television, radio & film) you’d have to hire even more people and expand your contact database even further. Even with all of that, how do you know your getting the best prices to produce your materials or attending the right shows or even using the best outlets for your marketing efforts?
With IEV Media, we’ll give you the same high-class marketing you get from a Madison Avenue Advertising firm with the service & dedication you expect from an in-house staff. We have an extensive range of contacts across the globe to ensure your pieces are produced at the best price, in the best quality possible, on time. Our advertising professionals have over 25 years of experience in the marketing & advertising industry and have won multiple Addy Awards (the advertising industry’s highest award) for their trade show, print & multimedia campaigns as well as for individual pieces. In addition, they have the experience of working in both the in-house and agency fields to bring you the best of both worlds at a price you can afford.
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Monitoring of Marketing Efforts - All of the planning and preparation is complete, you have a great plan, your first pieces have been designed & produced and now you’re just waiting by the phone for the first calls to come in. Your marketing is done, right? Wrong! Now that you are really starting your marketing campaigns you have to make sure that they are working properly and you are getting the best results possible. How do you do this? With a personalized system designed to measure the effectiveness of each individual marketing campaign as well as your overall marketing efforts. In addition to a system, you need to give thought to monitoring while you are planning & producing your marketing campaigns; after all, how can you track your efforts if you don’t know where the lead or sale came from? Once you do find out where it came from, how do you put it into a format that is useful? That’s where we come in. We’ll help you design a personalized system that is easy to use and even easier to understand.
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Revision of Marketing Plan - Once you have the results of your monitoring, you may need to make revisions to your marketing plan to ensure that you are focusing on the marketing efforts that work instead of wasting money of efforts that aren’t worth it. In addition, there may be new marketing possibilities developed that would be better for your company than the current methods being used. Marketing is never a “done deal”, it constantly changes & grows and your marketing plan needs to reflect this. In addition, marketing itself is a testing process, what may work for your competitor may not work for you. At IEV Media, we can help you keep up with current trends, ensure your marketing plan is up-to-date, help you stop wasting money on advertising that isn’t bringing in the business you want and help you discover what marketing that just doesn’t work for you.
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No matter what step you need help with or if you need someone to handle it all, we have the marketing solutions for you. No only do we have the tools necessary to develop and plan your marketing strategy, we have an award-winning team of artists, copywriters, proofers and more ready to add some creativity to your profit-building marketing strategy.
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