What marketing and promotion works best

Having read my previous articles on understanding, information importance and market positioning, you’ll be in a better position than most to understand what marketing and promotion is going to work best for you.

To quickly review those articles:

1. If you understand a customers needs, wants, behaviours and attitudes, you’ll be better able to service them and grow your business

2. If you’ve analysed the information and data you collected, you’ll have a better idea where and to whom you should focus your efforts

3. If you’ve established your market position then you have the ultimate power base in marketing from which to communicate - somewhere you can profitably compete. 

Not only is research into customers and their behaviour and attitudes important for selecting a market position, it is also often critical in understanding how they go about researching and choosing products and services like yours.

I’m sure you’d have no argument with the proposition that someone buying coffee probably follows a different approach than if they are buying a car. 

Every product and service and market has it’s unique characteristics and behaviours of consumers. In food, customers may want to search out the freshest or most organic ingredients. In a car they might be looking for luxury, or economy, or sportiness. 

If you’ve done your research well, you’ll already have a good idea of a few different marketing activities you could use to promote. Just by understanding customers, you may have knocked out several options - such as advertising in newspapers, or running promotions, or having billboards on the highway. If not, you probably haven’t learnt enough about your ideal customers and their behaviours. In this case I’d recommend going back and doing more research. 

Another way you can find out what works best, assuming you have no other direction from the research you’ve done, is to pilot some of your marketing ideas with a smaller budget, or perhaps over a shorter time period, or in a smaller geographical area. 

Piloting is an accepted method of trial and error, whilst spending just a fraction of your budget to find out what works best, then refining your program to only do the things that worked with the rest of your budget. 

There is no guess on what marketing will work best for a particular industry or company - although you might find clues in what the competition are doing. But beware, chances are, your competitors have no idea and are just following the masses, or the best media salesperson with their choice of marketing program.

The absolute best person to ask about where you should market is your customer. The second best is piloting a few ideas, then rolling out the successful programs.

They combine to become the fourth door to successful marketing - IMPLEMENTATION or execution. In my next article I’ll cover the fifth and final door, which finally and perhaps inevitably leads you to a point where you escape the mystery of better marketing and find the solution for your business.

If you’d like to know more about how to do this, read my books - Marketing has no Off Switch or Get your Marketing Cooking - both available on AMAZON.

https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B07DHG3RY4

Hunter Leonard is the Founder & CEO of Blue Frog Marketing - a strategic consultancy with clients in Australia, New Zealand and the USA. Hunter is highly respected in the industry, having achieved spectacular revenue growth results for his clients in the order of several billion dollars. He has written 11 books and delivered over 900 seminars and workshops on marketing since 2001. When not helping clients, he can be found playing his Maton Guitar, cooking up a storm or walking the forests, beaches and national parks of his home town of Coffs Harbour. www.bluefrogmarketing.com.au