How To Easily And Cautiously Make Your Marketing Plan?

If you do not have lot of experience with marketing, I would advise someone to help you who has experience and he can write the marketing plan for you but there is a hitch in it, It will cost you money if you are just staring out. It’s always better to create your own marketing plan rather than tossing aside the idea of not creating at all.Marketing plan is the much needed oil for any organization. Making good marketing plan was considered to be a tough task, until fairly recently, what was the purview of just the bigger companies is now possible for most. Let me give you some insights into how a basic level marketing plan is developed.

7 Easy Steps For Making Effective Marketing Plan:-

1. Determine And Finalizing What You Going To Serve And To Whom – Determining Your Target Market
2. Determining Your Positioning For Your Product
3. Develop The Product Plan
4. Develop And Build Your Pricing Plan
5. Develop Your Distribution And Logistics Plan
6. Develop Your Offline & Online Promotional Plan
7. Determine And Chalk Out Budget For Your Marketing Ideas

Product Finalization And Identifying Target Market For Your Marketing Plan

Coming to specifies, on what you going to sell and push in the market – make sure whatever you wish or plan to sell actually solve a real and genuine problem for the audience you want to sell to. Talk, communicate and engage with your audiences to know their pain areas. When you embark on this journey, try to take feedback from with the whole, rather than the subset. Avoid relying just on samples to determine the shape and form of the final product, as, often, the really interesting things in market are found that samples fails to catch.

A small insight: – Do not treat difficulty of interacting with all your customers as an unfortunate reality, rather see it for what it is a “necessary evil”. It is the backbone of measurement of the target at scale.

Positioning 
For your positioning make sure you communicate the USP, the point of difference and ensure it is included in your positioning that will attracts customers/buyers to your product. Use effective and low cost marketingmethods like digital marketing and mass marketing with social media. Generate awareness through word–of–mouth and social interactions as part of “Connected Marketing” to reach to the desired target audience.

Product Plan
Third, for your product plan make sure you survey the customer prospects to see what they want. Do ensure the customer survey is comprehensive and sufficient. The golden rule while doing survey is even if you have too much data then also “good enough” is not good enough. Also study your competitors to see what they doing, what’s working and what may be the strength and weakness of their product and also why customers are frustrated with existing product in the market. It is also sometimes termed as gathering “Competitive Intelligence”.

Doing so, is feasible, because success in business and in the product is in working with customers and not against them.

Deducing Pricing
Fourth, when you put together your financial or pricing plan ensure you are again looking at what your competitors are doing and analyzing what opportunities are working best for them and also ensuring that you price your product on the value (value based pricing) and not just on cost. Set the price of your product or the service offered on the tangible and intangible benefits it provides to the end consumer rather than fixing the price on the amount of money it takes to produce the product.

Preparing Distribution Plan
Fifth, for the distribution plan again you may like to look at what’s making sense for similar products in the market, contact the competitors and find how are competitors are doing, find out the latest trend and you may also like to think about how your customers may like to buy for you, where do they want to buy and create a distribution plan around that in order to satisfy your customer wants.

Developing Promotional Plan
Sixth, in your promotional plan make sure you know whom you are trying to target and what content is the most effective and ultimate message to communicate to the target audience. Next do take a quick look what marketing tactics your competitors are using and what methods have worked best for them and take a look at what promotional activities you have used in the past that has worked best for you, then use this information to select which promotional methods are going to work best to communicate the message you want to the target that you are targeting. In addition you want to use specialized consulting services to create a plan specifically to maximize the amount of referral you going to get as referrals are the number one source of new customers for the business.

Determining ROI For Each Promotional Idea
Finally list down all the examples of marketing strategies, sales and marketing, promotional, advertising ideas and creative marketing ideas, for your consumer products that you had and take a look at some of the matrix to see which are going to be most profitable. To do this take a look at the impressions that the marketing strategies will deliver. The estimated conversion rate will able to give you estimated ROI and also they take a look at the time, how much time it’s going to take to implement these type of marketing strategies and see which one’s appear to be the best options for your business.

The above mentioned 7 best practices of integrated marketing can be your most valuable tools while preparing your powerful marketing plan and your marketing ideas for small business. Simply put, poorly – prepared guys always finish last. Do not fall trap of procrastination. Do IT NOW with best marketing mix. You need to escape from it and use the above tips to make an impact to your business. As you make your way to make a marketingplan, you may grope in dark and may stumble. Use the above tips as landmarks and make your way to great leadership.

By Tarun Gupta

Creating a Marketing Plan – How It Has Transformed And Evolved

What is a marketing plan? Through this brief article I would like to articulate in short on how the process of analyzing and building a marketing plan and the concept of marketing management has evolved over a period of time. From my own research and business, I can say that marketing is the job to plan, create, communicate and deliver value to a target market at a profit. It is a business law and objective for all the entrepreneurs and also for the small, medium, large organizations and corporate. This holds true both for online as well as offline businesses.

Now let’s take this opportunity to discuss in detail, create, communicate and deliver. Creating value for the customers is called product management. Your product may be a service, tangible or intangible, but when you communicate value it’s called Branding and that’s brand management. There is a significant difference between product management and brand management. You could have five products, but what have you done to brand them, communicate excitement, differentiate them and lastly to deliver value. Thus is called customers management.

So according to the traditional business plans, the organizations used to run 3 businesses within one. They were:
A) Product Management
B) Brand Management
C) Customer Management

Progression Of Product Management In The New Marketing Plan

The business practice of product management was really like the independent business, it was like you have a company and from the inside you develop things and then ask your sales & marketing people to get rid of them. You do it internally, you do it with your own scientists and engineers, so what is strategically changing in product management today? Let’s take the example of Procter and Gamble (P&G), one of the largest FMCG company globally, the company not only has its own scientists and research team who are developing new products for them, but they have also connected with twenty times as many researches and scientists outside. Quite expectedly, the old idea was to do things secretly and protect the vital information. It was as if you were inventing something which the competitor with the likes of Unilever should not know about. it’s called the closed door policy. But now Procter & Gamble’s recent strategic and business planning is to tap resources and take service of scientists, researchers, analysts, anywhere in the world, at any price, who they believe have solutions to the problem that Procter & Gamble wants to solve.

Take a real time example, P & G makes a potato chips product called Pringles. They decided to print amusing and funny things on this popular product, but the big question the management faced was – how do you print this picture or a funny slogan on the product. Their in-house resources could not figure it out until they found and later took assistance from a cookie maker in Italy, who had been printing similar things in his hometown. This process is called open technology, open innovation. The key objective is to find the best ideas irrespective of where they come from. The new normal is to open product management.

Brand Management An Essential Ingredient For The Right Marketing Plan..

What is right brand management? Most of us believe that there are few functions within marketing which are sexy, such as branding focusing on flamboyance and exuberance, but in reality, it is anything but that. Earlier, brand building used to heavily revolve around packaging, a name or at the maximum was limited to a logo, but today as one can easily understand, marketing energy is spent mostly on “what you are all about”. Brand management today means to fulfill a promise, the brand inspires everything you do, the way you act when you approach and reach to the customers and the whole process is emotional, highly emotional, there is a new direction.

The traditional formula was, “I am going after your mind, I am going after your heart, I want mind share and I want heart share”. Nowadays marketers are saying that they also want spirit share. They care more for the soul than the bread. Share of something little more than narrow to your own financial and business interest. We might be affirmed that its civic, its caring and we want to be appreciated because we care about the shape of the world and that’s corporate social responsibility but in creating an emotional relationship its more than limited to the person’s own nurturing of his or her own ego.

Role Of Customer Management As A Powerful Marketing Plan
Nowadays, customer management has also changed, do you think you are doing customer management if you essentially have a database of customers and you are reaching them through direct means i.e. through online, email, phone calls and so on. Is that really customer relation management or dealing with a database? I think, plain enough, it requires an honest reflection. What is new about customer relationship management is that marketers want to meet the customers on a regular basis and know them really well beyond the database. Infact we want to get their help, to get the customers help for creating new refined products, we want to co-create with our customer, our products, we want their help in creating advertisements for us. It is but natural that the good thing about working with customers is that you have them on your side.

Be Prepared To Adopt The Change

So, all the future entrepreneurs, marketers, corporate managers, I rise to express on behalf of myself and other experiences marketers with whom I am associated with, that be prepared to embrace the change in the way newmarketing plans are written and execute to take best advantage of it. As famous saying goes “If you are prepared to welcome the unknown, you already know the secret of remaining victorious in all defeats and failures”. Be prepared to go that extra mile from where unsuccessful people chose to return. Be prepared for the radical change.

By Tarun Gupta

Type of Marketing Strategy To Be Adopted: Generalization or Specialization

Many organizations be it a product company or an online/digital company, all are striving hard to become generalist. This type of marketing strategy can be very lethal both for the stakeholders as well as the employees. The attitude of being everything for everyone is fraught with danger and is laughable. The old conventional wisdom talk about the generalist company is far more attractive as compared to the specialist brand. The philosophy of product and service extension has become the new trend in the current marketing scenario. Let’s take the example of marketing strategy of Colgate – Palmolive, it has killed the meaning of many its own internal brand for its consumers. Question: What exactly does Coalgate stands for in the market? Is it toothpaste, is it washing detergent, is it a shaving gel, is it a soap, actually what is it?? The resounding answer to this question is: It is all of the above. Extending the brand equity has become a cult and fad today. It has become a new normal today in the business. It has become a seminal part of the marketing plan.

In the name of saving the cost and achieving economies of scale, organizations are deliberately moving from a “specialist” that stand for a specific type of service or product or idea into a “generalized brand” that serve numerous types of products.

Example of Type Of Marketing Strategy Adopted By Tata Motors

For example, TATA motors markets a stunning 18 models in 10 nameplates, ranging from cheapest family car NANO to high end MUV and SUV’s. In addition, they produce and market mini and large trucks. So if I ask you a question what is TATA motors, is TATA a small, cheap, medium, expensive car or truck. TATA represents a “mega generalist brand”. Whatever you desire, TATA has got it. May that’s one of the main reasons why TATA motors has not been able to gain market leadership position in any of the sectors. NANO, inspite of heavy promotion and advertisement has failed to make any mark and impact in the consumers mind; where as TATA SAFARI has not done justice to its potential. TATA Motors, despite having all the right resources failed to gain market dominance.

Is that others players are better off than TATA, is that other players are using better innovative techniques to attract consumers, or is it that other brands have been more focused in their product development and slightly more focused in their marketing approach. Does generalization as a strategy should be advocated by the businesses? So to speak, it should not approached with such trepidation. It makes a great deal of sense with one important ground rule. No heavy competition should pursue the same line of business.

In actual fact, confusion is not the problem completion is.

Examples of Marketing Strategies Adopted By LG And The Learning’s From It
The sad saga of LG electronics in the consumer goods segment emphatically demonstrates the mentioned point. LG is world renowned product based company. So it was very much understandable that LG planned to enter into Indian market with wide variety of products i.e refrigerators, washing machine, air conditioners and mobile phones to name a few. However, the problem was very stiff and cut throat in each segment. There were specialists in each vertical. As expected, specialist brand overshadowed products in most of the segment. For example, LG launched mobile phones in India in the year 2009. It was doomed for failure. After gaining some traction it rapidly plummeted to dismal position hovering around a single digit market share. It lost out to specialized mobile dealers like Nokia, Micro Max, and HTC etc. I hope LG would soon realize the defect in its strategy until its reputation is damaged, almost, irreparably.

Which Type of Marketing Strategy Is More Beneficial To Adopt?

The larger point I am trying to make is, generalist are always exposed and susceptible. Whenever a generalist will go for battle against the specialist, generalist will always end on the losing side. What generalization does, it takes off the sheen of the brand and removes the basic identity in the mind of the consumer and the future prospect. Instead of building trust in consumers mind, it creates discomfort and commotion.

So far, taking cues from day to day operations of companies and personally analyzing the trend for past few years, generalization is a perfect strategy when the competition from the specialist never emerges, and also looking for another angle, generalization is poor if there is chance of a specialist in the guise of completion to strike back heavily. In real marketing world unlike the world of mathematics you increase sales by subtraction and not addition. To create a strong marketing impact be prepared to cut down and sacrifice. If you want to ever challenge the leader, prune the products and not bloat it.

Advantage of Choosing Specialization As A Type of Marketing Strategy Over Generalization
Come to think of it, when you move towards becoming a specialist you can focus your entire energy on one product, one interest, one benefit and one communication message. This way you can quickly move into people mind and create a long lasting impression. For example – Flipkart heavily focus on 24 hour deliver, whereas Myntra.com while promoting heavily through social media, talks about trying out apparels before making a purchase, Zara has positioned itself as the place for latest designs, Dominos Pizza focus on 30 minute home delivery etc. to name a few. Truth of the matter is, specialist has the ability to be perceived as an expert or the best. They are also sometimes tagged as originals.

To conclude: Acknowledge the distractions but remain unfazed by all of them and be focused on what you plan to do. Whatever type of marketing strategies you adopt, try hard to concentrate on what best you can do. Through focus you can aim to achieve unthinkable and reach unimaginable heights. Make sense. Right?

By Tarun Gupta

Should Marketing Tactics Drive Strategies For The Company?

Marketing tactics versus strategy: Role of tactics in making the overall strategy of the organization. After learning by spending good number of years in a product based Indian startup company as an entrepreneur and also learning from my experience of actively servicing large global companies, I have come to a radical conclusion. Sales, operational and marketing tactics should play a seminal role while formulating the overall strategy of the business. Strategy of a company should always be formed and developed by adopting a bottom-up approach and not the traditional top-down. To explain the above point more elaborately, the driving strategy of the organization should be developed by thoroughly understanding tactics of the business through involvement and deep knowledge.

I believe tactics should always guide strategy rather than the other way round. For example, the communication tactic should drive and govern the strategy to be adopted by marketing through the means of direct marketing, online marketing or digital marketing. Unfortunately, out of many marketers and senior people I got an opportunity to interact with, many of them believe in the reverse. The thought process which is accepted as a standard norm is that the overall strategy of the business should always be set first: and then it can followed by the tactics.

Changing The Traditional Mindset: Tactics Is The Subset Of Strategy

Strategy will always guide and direct tactics, is a golden rule which is deeply rooted in our system. We take it for granted and never ever question this obvious. The one of the best practices followed at most of the companies is to first decide the overall high level strategy and then slowly move down on to the tactics.

Authentic researches and real-life case studies have often tested and proved that businesses or brands that had set their strategies first adamantly refuse to accept defeat or nonperformance because they had figured out that all that was required to turn their assignment into a success was a minor modification in tactics.

In most of the business be it small, local or global business, leaders have the strong tendency to view things as they expect to see. This is tendency of a reacting social behavior. This is why I feel the approach of top down is littered with minefields and is dangerous. Adopting this approach they ignore the factors that aren’t linked to the accomplishment of the strategy.

So, when the process is upside down, you have strong possibility to make startling discoveries. For example an Indian major generic drug company had launched a product few years back which apart from curing headache and running nose also put users to sleep. This turned out to be grave problem if people wanted to go to important activities like driving or go to work. But instead of giving up on the product they positioned the product as the pain relief medicine for nighttime. It was a master advertisement tactic and marketing strategy and it worked brilliantly. It became a big marketing news in print as well as social media. It was for the first time that people had known a nighttime remedy and it created a nice in people’s mind leading to roaring success of the product. The marketing plan or rather I shall say marketing tactic adroitly adopted by the management surprisingly worked very well and It went on to become the most successful drug in the company’s history.

Here in the above example tactic to position the relief product uniquely and differently guided and ruled the strategy for the company which was to introduce a new major pain relief drug. A Master stroke indeed. Highly appreciable.

How to be different from the competition?

Competitive Angle in Marketing Tactics

I would like to highlight another useful tip; a tactic should have a competitive bend or angle in order to have a chance to succeed. This can be done by creating an element of uniqueness and differentiation. How to be different from the competition? It could be cheaper, more expensive, smaller, bigger, lighter and heavier. Furthermore, the tactic should be competitive in the complete marketing ring and not just in relation to two or three services or products.

For example, the brilliant business marketing tactic of Volkswagen to introduce the “The first” small car was a stunning marketing and media tactic and it created a competitive edge. At the same time in late fifties other competitors in the industry including General Motors were manufacturing BIG cars. The Volkswagen beetle was a huge success. The Volkswagen was not the small car in the US market but also through right advertising and marketing mix it gradually enjoyed the advantage of occupying the “small position” in the minds of the consumers across the world.

“Think small” was the popular advertisement run by Volkswagen. A highly popular ad.

Easily Identifying Strategic Thinker And Tactical Thinkers In Your Organization

• Leaders and thinkers in the organization who conceive things strategically always try to force things to happen. While the people who follow and adopt the tactical approach always look for things to explore and exploit.
• Strategic thinkers adopters will farm in the already existent market and tactical adopters will try to look for new markets at the first available opportunity.
• Strategic thinkers are internally driven and while the tactical leaders are externally driven.
• Strategic thinkers will have their eyes set on long – term success and then second priority on short term success whereas tactical leaders first aim at short-term success with long term success in mind.

Go Get Attached With Marketing Tactics
With the courage of stating my conviction openly, I strongly feel any attachment with strategy and strategic thinking is quite dangerous. Do you ever feel like you’re struggling to find more time to implement the long term strategies, but even though you’re working harder, you’re not content with the result and it is no where closer to what you’ve always desired?

Here’s why … building long term strategies are simply worthless. “Strategy” – a lot of corporate managers use it to superfluously describe their thoughts and ideas about what should be done, as opposed to spending time on developing executable tactics be it sales tactics to get more business or be marketing tactics with the aim to promote brand. To put it simply, It is all about doing actual work.

By Tarun Gupta

Get A Great Marketing Mix Through Your Tactical Decisions

When it’s a question of a marketing mix and related decision making, how to plan and make an effective one is the most difficult one to answer for the leadership of an organization. But one way to chart out an effective marketing strategy is through the development of effective “tactics” and the critical tactical decisions that you make. But beware, no tactic is ever lasting. They are valid only for short durations. An obvious question arising here is, how would we then frame effective marketing mix? Answer lies in converting these short term tactics into long term strategies. The key for which is TIME. By spending more time or continuing with a same tactic longer than usual makes it a strategy. Today, most of the companies are employing these tactics as a base of their long term international marketing strategies. For example If an apparel company say Levis, is giving an option of two–for-one sales in India. This is a discount tactic. This tactic is made keeping competition from the corporate as well as customer behavior and his needs, in mind in India. This tactic helps Levis against Hilfiger, Spykar, Diesel etc. But mind you, this same strategy may not be valid in other geographies. So, one should be very cautious while using any tactic, because in turn that would affect the overall marketing mix of the company.

Converting Tactics To Successful Marketing Mix Strategies

To convert a tactic into a good marketing mix strategy, the business must find unique ways to integrate tactic into the DNA of an organization, to make it the most essential concept in the organization and the prime reason for its existence and survival. Many organizations be it a small or a big one, through extensive market research and business studies on a marketing model and tools, have religiously used discount tactics and have converted it into the mainstream strategy of the company. It has become a new norm for a company’s management. The tactics of the organization became coherent with the sales, marketing, and operation strategy of the company over an extended period of time.

One of the most discussed and talked-off case studies of this era, is about the pizza chain which has very well followed the above rules of Marketing Mix. Dominos when entered into the Indian market, they targeted the growth opportunities here by introducing the tactic of 30-minute delivery. They claimed that the order would become free if they miss the deadline of 30 minutes. With this the brand gained lot of trust from the people. This development in the service industry was very new to the world. But over a period of time, it became part of the business strategy. They carried this strategy online and thereafter spread the promotions fast over digital platform i.e. social media as well. This advertising strategy of Dominos became companies USP.

Almost all other chains who would have thought to adopt this tactic, would have adopted a TOP – DOWN approach, the old marketing management approach. Like 1) What pizza items do we want to have on the menu 2) how long would it take to deliver?

Dominos did exactly the reverse, converting tactic into a strategy, they made a plan to design their menu in such a manner, that deliberately placed its products (mostly pizza’s) which can smoothly fit into 30 minute delivery cycle. This was a brilliant planning in achieving the right marketing mix, I must say, an awesome move of doing tactical business has left its imprints on history as well as in my mind.

Getting Marketing Mix Right

Looking at the matter from correct marketing mix standpoint, whether you using 1+1 discount (2 for price of 1), or using 30-minute delivery tactic or whatever, when you transform your tactic into a company-wide strategy then it has to be maintained over an extended period of time. There is no scope for shortcuts. There is no direct marketing way, as theory suggests, which you can just adopt as it is. Mind you, in all sense, it is not at all easy. To modify and rework the products to fit into a tactic which will ultimately lead to change in long term is indeed a tough task.

To transform a tactic into a long term strategy, the business should be mentally prepared to change the product line, pricing, promotion, production planning and even the complete marketing mix if need be. You cannot force the external environment or the market place to change. An in-depth analysis has to be done. Efforts towards the change i.e. good amount of resources and cash flow need to be directed internally.

As described in my previous article, most companies start with building blueprint/strategy and then establish what they want to do and then they try to set the tactics essential to achieve their long term strategic ambitions. Long term objectives which are too generic, too difficult to implement and execute and too distinct, gets naturally weeded out once companies adopt bottom up approach. I have personally experienced while consulting several corporations that most of the blueprints which company prepare are far away from reality and are not executable. The biggest reason why they fail is, because the data regarding the end consumers isn’t researched properly, eventually leading to a faltered marketing mix for the organization.

Top Management In Synch With Marketers – Driving Marketing Mix Of An Organization
I have noticed time and again, that over ambitious goals, over bloated targets, overly generic marketing mix elements i.e. the four P’s – product, price, promotion and place, often lead to irreversible catastrophic disasters. It is a grave and serious concern. Do you know who face the brunt of the poor deployment of strategy? Is it the CEO or the top management who made the blueprint sitting in the corporate in their ivory towers? The answer is resounding no. To put it simple, the sales and field executives are striving hard to execute the marketing mix strategy and they are the ones who take the major blow.

When you adopt the traditional top-down method, you build a strategy and then move to build tactics; in this situation you actually divert your focus and energy on many different tactics. As expected, it is followed by most of the tactics turning out to be ineffective and impotent. Why would they work? They were not chosen because they would be effective; they were adopted because it would be supported by the formulated strategy. At the same time, having multiple tactics turns everything into a mess and it leads to incoherence.

It is hard for me to contemplate that why would marketer prefer two moves over one. This situation often gives me feeling that the chauffeur is losing hold of the brake and the crash is imminent. Inevitably all corporate managers attack all the markets will all their brands at the same time. They even try and introduce new products along with the existing brands that even cannibalize the earlier ones. They make this destructive mistake very often. This is a fatal and catastrophic lapse. Businesses who believe in conquering at all fronts usually spend hours and vast amount of energy to do it. The truth of the matter is working hard not always leads to success. It is an irony, it is a matter for regret and it is unbelievable, but it is all the same the truth, the naked truth. So is there any secret in the dark? I dare to expose it.

Success Mantra – Effective Marketing Mix Through Tactics
Success in bringing up the perfect marketing mix depends on analyzing the situation and making one audacious and courageous move which is least familiar with the competitor. Finding that one weakness in your competitors and finding yourself a differentiators takes a lot of effort and is not at all an easy task. In most of the cases, there is only one place where the competitor is most exposed and vulnerable, the so called “Achilles Heels”. It should be the focus and target of attack. Follow the unanticipated tactic. This tactical move should lead into a permanent strategy of the business. Once you finalize the tactic, dedicatedly put your best resources in this move, make right communication to the world without giving up, success is then sure to touch your feet.

Donald Trump has rightly said, “As long as you are going to be thinking anyway, think big”

Remember strategy is like a screw driver and the tactic is like a screw. The penetration in to the material is done by the screw and not the screw driver. You may have world’s best screw driver but it won’t be at all effective until and unless it is placed aptly on the screw. Tactics in isolation may be a small thing but when all the tactics add up they turn into a strategy which is indeed big. This fact is compelling and captivating, but until and unless a proper execution is done, all will go waste. In short, just keep observing the world, listen to your customer and keep making excellent marketing mix. Inculcating these few critical suggestions in your marketing plan be it for domestic or overseas marketing along with competitive marketing techniques i.e. penetration pricing, would definitely help you in fulfilling your customer needs leading to higher customer satisfaction levels, which would eventually help you stand apart from your business competitors in this tough business environment.

By Tarun Gupta

Growing Business Through Advertising Strategies – “Using Follow-up Systems”

In today’s fast moving world, using innovative advertising strategies has become an imperative. You can’t survive by just working in silos, without letting the world know what you are up to. It’s a common practice that people usually carry a business card while they go out somewhere, so that they are able to leave a token of their remembrance with the other person. That’s a very good advertising strategy, I must say, but the general fate of a business card, is what really bothers me. You just tend to oblige the person by taking it from him, you feel it and then it simply goes into your pocket. See with this, the whole idea of your well framed advertising strategy piece goes wasted, by just this simple ignorance of the other person. A time may come when it becomes fateful enough to take it out of your pocket, you touch it again and you may now think, ahh finally the advertising strategies will pay off, but what happens generally is that, it is just put onto your working desk and then when you see it again, you again put it in your big bucket of cards.

Now you’ve seen how a well structured framework of advertising strategies also fails in situation where the other person is just bothered or we may say completely informed about the importance of what you have given him after so much thought. This is how the business card reaches its so called destination “the bucket of cards”, during this cycle one gets so multiple opportunities of exposures to these cards. But, what you actually do with these business cards once you have them is all the more interesting. You don’t even bother to make note of the important details like name, phone no. etc.

Start Executing Your Advertising Strategies

Well, if you ask me how I myself execute these advertising strategies – what I do with them is I first put them into a system, to input the information into a database. I do not use a most sophisticated “CRM”, customer relationship management for this. I normally use my email, my Gmail for this purpose. This in turn helps me make a stronger advertising strategy to make my business grow. What I do is, when I take a business card and I take the name, email, and the phone number from it and I type in all the details myself into the system, I don’t prefer any secretary or assistant or an intern or even a scanner for this purpose, probably it may not be the most efficient way to take out the information. But one advantage that I get from this activity is that I am able to remember most of the names from whom I had taken these cards. It helps me connecting with those people well by just remembering their names and the last time I had met them. I make it a practice to take cards from all the people I meet during any of the events I go, but I don’t stop this process here.

The most important step in this process is to do a “Follow up”, without this step being done properly all theadvertising strategies efforts which the person had made previously, would go wasted. So, I always make it a point to send all of them the follow up emails. Doing this is not at all easy. It requires discipline and requires commitment, since the follow up has to be religiously done the very same day I get the business card. Although, it takes just 5 minutes to write an email the same day, as it would take after two weeks. But the “value” starts to diminish exponentially with time, say if this activity is delayed by some days or several months and that is where you realize how good was your advertising strategy which became an integral part of your growing relationships and thereby has brought you some good business.

Most Integral Part Of Your Advertising Strategies – How To Make It Right?

Now the question arises, what to actually write in this follow up. What you need to write in this is just simple – what you actually talked about in the event with the person. If I had talked about something interesting, I’ll definitely mention it in the follow up mail, so that it’s easy for him to remember me. But at the same time you need to be creative and smart enough while reciting the same otherwise your audience won’t be interested in it. You may write something like this to remind them, “Remember we talk about….”, “Remember I was the guy with the red tie…..”, keeping your positioning clear.

If you do this religiously every time you get a new business card, your contact database would be your biggest asset. And even if you move to a different business, you would always have a ready made contact database with you. But you would wonder, how would this help me, why should I invest so much time in this, what would be the returns for me? All these questions troubling you would be answered soon. I’ll just tell you a real life example. Once, I met a guy who was a sales person, but was out of the business for couple of years, worried about this current situation, he was looking for some person who could help him get a good job. I asked him, why he did not use his database contacts, he was a sales guy; he must have had relationships with many people/consumers and suggested him to explore those contacts rather than asking people to help him reach to the person who can actually help. In response to my suggestion, he said, “my entire contact list is cold, I need to start from scratch”, that’s the belief he had, with which I didn’t agree at all. According to me, he had already done the biggest mistake of his life by being out of the business, and not keeping the contacts fresh and alive, ignoring the strategic aspect of maintaining those relationships. But, you should never do such a mistake otherwise you won’t find a way back.

All you need to do this is to strategize and maintain an active contact database.

Moving Ahead With The Follow-up Advertising Strategies
To start with, you need to categorize your customer list on the basis of their importance. This you can do in many ways using your creativity, one is you can start by making 3 categories – most important, second most important and least important “everyone else” group. In general, around 75% of the people in your database would come under the “everyone else” group. This categorization would help you in setting up a timeline for yourself for different groups. For example, I would like to keep in touch with “everyone else” group once a quarter or once every 3 months. Around 20% of the people in the database are the ones who likely know and trust me, so I would like to keep in touch with them once a month and then there would be 5%, whom I call my “key success partners or target consumers”. These are the people, who are most likely to help me achieve my goals today and tomorrow. Some of these people, would include my close friends and family, some clients, or may be some active business partners as well. This would be your main market from where you’ll get your business, so keep good focus on their developments. It’s the kind of advertising you do with this group will eventually make difference in your business. I would like to keep in touch with these people once a week to maintain strong connect and a good brand presence with them.

Reviewing & Pruning – An Important Aspect Of Advertising Strategies
Then comes the time to start “reviewing”. I start off with a Friday Review, wherein I scan those 5% of the group. I cross check if I have touched base with all those people, if not I will shoot them an email. This is how I complete my weekly review. In my monthly review, I pull out my 20% of the group, while in the quarterly review I go through the whole thing. Along with these reviews one of the thing I do on a regular basis is to prune-off the poisonous people from the database. These are those, who are negative accounts and are no long in my email lists/contact lists. People whose energies are not viable with me, are always comparing, bad customers, I just prune them. People to whom you may be giving your time and energy, but they are not giving you anything back in return, can certainly be considered in the poisonous group and are not be considered in your top 5% or top 20% list. If you are able to identify them, and the quicker you move away from them, better it is. My father once told me, when he moved from School to College, he used to spend his time with positive and vibrant people. When I asked why – he said “Because I always wanted to have good grades, so I preferred hanging with people with good grades only, and stay away from the company of the bottom scorers. This would help him stay in the contact of the intelligent group, and to stay competitive at the same time.

One must always focus on the most valuable relationships.

Apply The Pareto’s Principle In Your Advertising Strategies
Here, I would like to focus on a very important rule “80:20 rule” of marketing which will help you in executing your advertising strategies. It says that, one must always focus on the most valuable relationships.

While, the biggest mistake people make while networking is, they say “I do not know enough people whom I can tell about my product, I need to make fresh relationships”, instead of saying “I need to network with the people I know now, the people that are currently in my contact database to tell them about the products I have”.

Going Beyond Emails – Adding Personalization And Being Creative With Advertising Strategies
My mother used to always say that thank you cards, emails and thank you SMS are worth their weight in gold. The mail space is getting less and less crowded as digital space is getting more and more crowded. To stand out in this crowd, you really need to be creative and do something different, like writing a thank you card, hand written with real signature and stamp. I myself have written a lot of thank you cards and believe me it actually pays dividends which are huge. So, do what you can do to stand out, do something physically- add a touch of personalization. Always remember, the person out there would be going to touch and feel your response, so in order to make your mark in his mind it should be something special. If they find it special, they may even keep your thank you notes for rest of their lives, some people do so. They may pin it up on their walls, may talk to someone else, that “I got thank you note from that guy”. Just imagine how good you would feel them. And if it’s just an email, they will see it and delete it, without thinking for it ever again.

Social Media – Yet Another Way To Achieve Desired Outcome Of Your Advertising Strategies
Another way to stay in connect with contacts that reside in your database, is “Social media” which can help you in achieving the desired outcomes of your advertising strategies. I use it generally to communicate that is public, especially for generic advertising. Once I had a conversation with somebody on Facebook. He made a post and I commented on it, and in response he replied back saying ‘’hey how are you”, “what’s going on”, “what’s new” etc. I responded “I to coming to Mumbai (this man I am talking about was also from Mumbai), hearing so, he sent me an invitation to his event, which I accepted and we later exchanged a lot many messages. Then I realized, hey, my conversation with that person is pretty much available on my wall for all the people to see, as well on his wall. I could also connect with people who were linked to that post of the person at no extra cost but this all is too personal. “Social media” can be also be a passive way of following up different people at no additional cost. Your work as an advertiser becomes pretty much easy. Rather than being into one to one relationships through emails, you are able to make one to many relationships in lesser time with wider reach.

One of the most promising social media platform for communication in today’s age is Twitter, which is becoming an increasingly important part advertising strategies. Through it you are able to easily remind people that you exist and remain at top of their mind. That’s what your aim should always be “To have a distinct position for yourself in their mind” That’s how, I use social media. I admit my understanding of it is not super deed, but I am definitely able to connect well with people on it this is what I can assure you from my experience. But since, it’s too public, one word of caution that should be kept in mind always wherever social media is concerned, i.e. you should carefully decide your target group and the kind of advertising strategies you would use keeping the actual intention subtly hidden and covered under wraps.

By Tarun Gupta