All posts in Marketing Services

What is a Strategic Marketing Plan?

By On May 24, 2013 In Digital Marketing, email marketing, Marketing Services, Marketing Tips With No Comments Permanent Link to What is a Strategic Marketing Plan?Permalink

I’ll let you in on a secret: Marketing is 20% strategy and concept creation and 80% implementation. The inability to properly follow through with a marketing strategy is money wasted. Think about it. Have you ever gone live with advertising, an event, or some other marketing program and realised you missed a number of opportunities to leverage your efforts across another channel? Or, did you fail to cover all of your bases when telling your customers about the program? You may have mentioned it on the blog, but, really, wouldn’t a journalist want to know about it too? These scenarios are all often the result of not having a thorough enough strategic marketing plan.

The point of strategic marketing and a strategic marketing plan is to take a long term view of your actions as a means to maximise ROI. For digital marketing, this includes considering the massive investment in time and money spent on blogs, white papers, videos, and other content-related projects and identifying each opportunity to promote them. You want to lay out each of those opportunities in a formal plan to ensure each touch point is addressed at the right time(s). Working as a virtual dashboard or checklist, the strategic marketing plan is a way to organise your marketing efforts each day, week, month, and year

Without such an action plan there is risk of missing promotional opportunities; your marketing may even fail altogether! Worse still, neglecting to take a strategic approach to marketing can cause you to have a major budget blow out. Oftentimes, resources are wasted because of poor planning as companies rush to create new materials for each effort rather than leveraging the items they already have. Organisation through a strategic marketing plan is designed directly to avoid such a scenario

The point is to create a long-term outlook on a company’s goals and objectives, along with the tactics and strategies that will be used to accomplish them. To accomplish this, strategic marketing plans contain several elements meant to provide a macro overview of your marketing efforts. Depending on the customer, plans may include email marketing, content marketing, blog posts, case studies, video marketing, social media updates, targeted keywords, and supporting advertising—which will be conveniently located all in the one place.

When your company decides to undertake a formal marketing strategy with Pollen or anyone else, the formulation of a strategic marketing plan is absolutely essential for success, and to make sure of this every single one of our clients receives a strategic marketing calendar. 

Are you looking for online business marketing services to boost your bottom line? Brief Us and tell us about your business goals..

If marketing isn’t working, you’re asking the wrong questions

By On May 7, 2013 In Marketing, Marketing Consulting, Marketing Services, Marketing Tips, Target Market With No Comments Permanent Link to If marketing isn’t working, you’re asking the wrong questionsPermalink

Often I get asked, how do I know who and where to market to for the biggest bang for my buck?

Firstly, you need to understand the characteristics of the people who are most suitable for your product or service. They are typically referred to as your target market. Coming to appreciate them and their uniqueness produces a number of advantages, including higher response rates for advertising, as well as a lower marketing budget.

Knowing who is buying or who would benefit most from using your product or service also helps you decide how and where to promote your business. Traditionally, organisations overlook this part of the marketing plan or, at minimum, barely scratch the surface of its potential. Here are some important points to consider if you want to avoid this pitfall.

Who Are Your Target Market…and What Matters Most to Them?

Define who your target customers are and how they behave. You can include age, gender, social status, education, and attitudes. Consider their lifestyles, activities, values, needs, interests or opinions.  But if you really want to make this work, you have to find out the thoughts that consume their time. You can start by finding out what gives them pain or distress or what they aspire to be.

See full article – Natalie Giddings (MYOB)

 

14 Marketing Tasks to Outsource

By On July 6, 2009 In Marketing Services With 3 Comments Permanent Link to 14 Marketing Tasks to OutsourcePermalink

Whether you’re a small business owner or entrepreneur – every minute of your day counts – Time is money. Small starts ups often don’t have a budget for a full time marketing manager either. Think about outsourcing these 14 tasks:

Website Design: Every business needs a website these days. There are brilliant free options out there now, but learning every trick in the book is very time consuming. Bringing in a web designer to handle set up and marketing services for maintenance can free up time. Google also loves fresh content for its website rankings.

Blogging: While I believe you should be in control of your social media avenues, engaging a freelance writer to broaden your ideas/thoughts and broadcast them is better than never getting the words out at all. Choose somebody with experience within your industry.

Media Contacts & Press Releases: A marketing specialist can research and compile a list of specific media contacts, write a press release and email out releases along with follow up phones calls.

Social Networking: Providing regular, valuable content to your followers is key to making the most out of your social network sites. A marketing service can keep all your profiles up to date and respond to comments on your blog for maximum traction.

Assessing Advertising: Can’t get around to placing that ad or now what suits your niche? Marketing services can compare price, calculate reach and return on investment in a nice little report.

Marketing Research: All business projects should entail some degree of market research to maximise its success – though firms will often skip over it and wander why things don’t work out how they planned. Marketing services can interview members of your target market and source industry research you otherwise don’t have access too. New product innovations or often born in this space.

SEO: Outsourcing your search engine optimisation to a SEO specialist is a must and can ensure that your website ranks well for your niche. The cost is often less then you think.

Database Management: If you rely on a database of existing and past customers — or you’ve built a database of individuals you think could become future clients — you may want to have it updated. A Marketing service can update all the contact information and get the name of the correct personal.

Event Organisation: When it comes to planning an event, it’s worth bringing in a professional event organiser. Invitations, registrations and meal planning are just a couple of the related tasks and all are incredible time suckers. There is nothing glamorous about it. Even if you only do one event a year, an event organiser can handle all of the details.

Newsletter Management: Newsletters are a great way to stay front if mind and in touch with your existing clients, but companies struggle to find the time to create them. All parts of a newsletter can be outsourced. You may even consider outsourcing your internal newsletter.

Article Writing: Distributing articles about your company’s niche, linking to your site, and citing you as an expert, can help market your company online. You can engage a writer to create just a few such articles or a large batch, just as you might hire a freelance writer for another project.

Marketing Audit: Many marketing firms offer services that assess your marketing efforts. They are designed to highlight gaps in your current marketing and deliver a roadmap. You may be spending unnecessary time and money on things that are just never going to make an impact.

Customer Feedback: Conducting surveys or interviewing with your clients and compiling results are best outsourced, otherwise you are in danger of setting up and proving your own hypothesis and missing what you really need to hear. Consider doing this after every major implementation or project or all at least once on a larger scale.

Marketing Materials: Business cards, brochure ware, and other marketing materials are a necessity for most businesses, but contacting a graphic designer is only the start. A marketing specialist can also assess its purpose, relevance of images, copy and distribution to maximise the impact and save it from being placed in the bin.

Are you looking for online business marketing services to boost your bottom line? Brief Us and tell us about your business goals..