Situational Marketing (4)

By promotional campaigns
Companies could stimulate their market presence through sales promotions and campaigns. This form of marketing works occasionally because it is in human nature to get something for nothing. (But not like the lottery or gambling kind of promotion that prevalent in our marketplace today where some enterprises almost extort their consumers). Andrew Griffiths quipped, ‘All businesses can have specials and all businesses should have specials because they make customers feel lucky and they tend to buy more’.

This mode of marketing should serve two main purposes. First is to reward your dedicated customers across the ranks of your clients, whose loyalties are needed to keep the business going. By doing this, you acknowledge that you appreciate their choice of choosing your product-service, in the midst of the growing competition, and hence you keep them for life. Always bear in mind that most customers have the habit of changing allegiance to any establishment that tend to offer them something that they can’t get elsewhere.

If you have clients who have identified with your business for a long time, this is one of the best ways to reward them. You know the effort you are making to get new customers why lose those you already have? Taking any client for granted has grounded many businesses. (And usually, this also whets the appetite of prospective customers).

Secondly, promotional campaigns could also lower the ladder to appeal to the minds of undecided buyers. This makes it easier to convert prospective customer to customers. And for the later, your promotional campaigns should be around your unique qualities, and more than the competition can offer. I must warn that no establishment should make it their main means of marketing or rather getting customers’ attention. But should serve as a way of adding to whatever marketing strategy that is on ground.

It makes a whole lot of sense for an outfit to introduce promotional campaigns once in a while, both to get the attention of prospective customer, and to retain the devotion of existing ones. From findings, promotions are just short-term marketing tool, and should essentially serve this purpose. This idea works most for a product-based business. And for a service-based outfit, they can creatively introduce it too. I want to ask, how much have you rewarded your loyal customers lately?

By direct / cold marketing
This is a very popular means in generating customers to whatever product-service that you sell. One of the ways to market is to talk to people. I am yet to see a thriving outfit that has not got marketers but I have seen those who didn’t market but are out of business today. Our marketing approaches differ, leading to the type of results that we get. Let’s also examine this segment of marketing.

One significant thing that counts in marketing is the customers’ perception of your product-service, and how those perceptions affect them emotionally. Your duty as a good marketer is to come-up with marketing messages that affects their perception and appeal to their emotions. But you have to understand your target market, especially your buyers, and communicate well your product-service. You’d short-change yourself if you don’t know who you are marketing to. It’s usually difficult to relate to a person you barely understand in any way. A good understanding of who is buying helps you to build the right platform to achieving your marketing objective effortlessly.

Marketing is basically a game of mental warfare; a battle of perception, and not of product or service. The rule of this game is manipulating consumers’ perceptions so as to appear as the best and also the most preferred. There are no best products, not even one; all that exist in the world are perceptions in the mind of the customer or prospect customer. But we can influence people’s perception by knowing first of all what they value, or what value means to them.

Buyers buy on value. And interestingly, value is subjective, and subjectivity is guided by perception. (You can re-read that again). Consequently, it is the duty every marketer to create a channel to influence people’s perception based on what they care about. This sometime might require you to play on people’s emotions not to manipulate but to win them over.

You would primarily need to determine your customer’s make-up and personal inclination to the product-service that he or she wants to buy. For instance, his personality and communication style, and then channel what you’ve got to meeting this unique make-up. As people differ, so are the strategies for reaching them. As we are different, so are our needs, expectations and drives. And anybody that addresses these needs have won our hearts! To help you understand your buyer better, here is my advice: listen, observe and follow through. You’d be astonished at what you will discover. Remember, it all begins in listening, and not just with your ears but your eyes and your body.
As I conclude, it’s very critical that we understand that there’s a new marketing horizon, and we’d have to cross this new business chasm by developing improved marketing means that would give us better returns. And this requires some element of ingenuity. After all, marketing encompasses everything you do to attract and keep customers in your business, and sometimes your activity-posture may change. We would have to combine logic (and sometimes intuition), and connecting them to synchronize with feelings of the buyers to achieve this intention. Thus, every establishment that really want to remain competitive in this dispensation should act fast by implementing their innovative ideas if they are going to have strong competitive position.

And more importantly, business people should ensure that any method that they adopt in marketing their product-service should reinforce their presence in the marketplace. I think we can still be a little bit tactical about our marketing approaches, and watch the positive effect that will follow. I think that the mainstream media dying? Don’t just get tied-up with what is popular; once in a while, try to experiment. Task your brain. It pays to do so.

Spending so much money on marketing is a waste when you don’t know how to effectively communicate to those who need your offerings. And like Morita Akio, Japanese business executive said, ‘Communication is the most important form of marketing’. At the root of excellent marketing is excellent communication skill. Marketing is about communication, and that entails talking and listening i.e. getting feedbacks.

The cash flowing into your business presently is in direct proportion to the quality of what you are communicating to the market, and also hoe they are receiving them. Marketing has been said to be an act of conversation, where the market is the conversation. A good relationship between you and the buyers is an indispensable tool to a productive marketing, whether it is done one by one, or on mass. My team and I would be unleashing some cutting-edge strategies on how to win the market war in our next business development training workshop. Feel free to me a mail if you are interested. Now that you know, it’s up to you to make the marketing side of your business to happen!

Tony Ajah is a highly consulted business growth strategist, and the Principal Strategist, TA Strategic Solutions, a Lagos-based firm that is into business growth and development. tony@ta-strategies.com ajahxt@yahoo.co.uk 01 958 7802