If you are trying to get your ducks in the row for a marketing strategy for your company or business, there are five key considerations to any successful marketing campaign.

1. You Need a Good Product to Market. This may seem like a no-brainer, but good advertising relies on good products. Consider that no matter how well a product is marketed, if it has the reputation of being a bad product, no amount of marketing will help sell it. For example, remember the “New Coke” introduced in 1985 by the Coca Cola Company? They spent huge amounts of money rolling this new product out, but ultimately it was a huge failure. Why?  There are many speculations about it, but the bottom line is that people did not think the new product was good, so it tanked. Lesson number one for all businesses and companies trying to introduce their new product into the market: ensure you have a good product to sell and it will help sell itself.
2. Go with Practical Advertising and Keep it Relevant. Think about the effective marketing you see with widely known and successful companies. Their advertising doesn’t focus on the product or a history that people don’t care about, so much on how it meets the needs of consumers. Consider how many prescription medicine TV advertisements focus on how much better your life will be if you have this medication versus if you do not. The focus is not so much on the medicine itself, but the lifestyle and happiness of the individuals in the commercial as a direct result of the medicine. Know your demographic and shoot for marketing your product so that it is meeting a need consumers have.
3. Keep Your Online Marketing Simple. Consider how easy your website is to use for the average person. You may notice there are websites out there that spend a lot of money to bedazzle with flash design, games, or other intriguing features to grab attention, but this marketing method is detrimental in the end. It may be surprising, but clear, succinct, and highly relevant content is what will attract customers. Think about like this: you can watch an action movie with a lot of stunts, explosions, and special effects but if it doesn’t have a good storyline you don’t get drawn into it. The other side of the coin is the non-flashy films that have solid storylines, good dialogue and character development that is so well written and acted that they win Oscars. You want your website to be the equivalent of this kind of film.
4. Not all Publicity is Good. Some people think that any publicity is good publicity, but this is not true if it’s negative press. Some businesses support this creed, and may attempt to leverage a sensitive or negative situation to get attention from consumers, but if the company’s integrity is questioned, is it really good publicity? You don’t want your customers to have a negative opinion of your business, so remember that ultimately you don’t want to sacrifice your good name for a little publicity.
5. Expand on Successful Product Ideas. If you come up with a good idea or a good product that consumers like, don’t be afraid to expand on it. Remember the first “Dummies” book that came out? Dan Gookin had a great idea to write a “DOS for Dummies” book in 1991, and that book sold so well and was so popular, that these instruction manuals “for dummies” have been expanded into several categories and are translated into several different languages. If you have a great idea about one product for your business, consider ways that you can expand on it.

For more information about effective marketing strategies, contact us here at ePromoters to get ideas for your individual business.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 31st, 2008 at 12:00 pm and is filed under News & Updates. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.