The 14 Ps of Mixed Media Marketing - Part 5

Precision
One of the greatest advantages of using a mixed media marketing approach for your advertising is the ability to target your market precisely. Online advertising is the only real precise form of advertising. Traditional advertising is a very rough estimate in comparison. If you want to reach women who are 25-35 years and earn between $30,000 and $50,000 and interested in the health of their pet, you can online! And it will cost you only a fraction of what it would to advertise in a pet magazine or women’s magazine! What’s more is that you will get a direct response and the results are available almost instantly!

How accurate do you think the readership, viewer or listener figures are? How targeted are the commercials you see or hear to your needs?

We are overloaded with irrelevant messages – even online. The Internet Age led to the Information Age and now we are in the Attention Age where advertisers are competing for attention. Our local newspaper is still pushing the message “use a medium that will reach the most people” to small-medium local businesses! This works for the masses that need to choose a mobile company and who want to see the latest Toyota but the masses won’t enroll in a teaching degree or buy luxury home floor plans.

If you know your customers well enough you should be advertising precisely to them. Avoid wasting your precious marketing budget.

It is easy for us to guarantee your advertising will work and generate a profit because we only advertise to where your customers are when they want you. This is Precision!

The 14 Ps of Mixed Media Marketing – Part 4

People
This P has been touted as one for the services industries. However, mixed media marketing does not see any reason why this should not be applied to all marketing. People are always integral. It is people that we target and motivate to respond to our marketing efforts. The behaviours of these groups must be understood by you, the marketers and the business.

The People that must be considered in mixed media marketing are:

• Employees – what are their attitudes towards the company? Are they being used to their potential in their strengths? How do they interact with customers?
• Sales and representatives – are they recreating the desired representation of the company? Are they passionate about the product? What feedback are they receiving from the market?
• Target market audience – what do they need? What is important to them? What message are they receiving from you? What are they thinking? What are their options?
• Consumers – are they satisfied? What are their perceptions having purchased from you?

Those People who are internal need to be able to add value to the product or service experience that you are offering. You can only know this when you have investigated the issues and perceptions of these groups.
Those People who are external and are interacting with your brand or company need to be communicated to effectively about what your business can offer. You can only know this with marketing research. It will reveal how people are receiving and responding to your marketing and the perceptions in the marketplace.

Your mixed media marketing success depends on your ability to win People.

The 14 Ps of Mixed Media Marketing – Part 3

Product
The original 4 Ps of the marketing mix are still applicable today in mixed media marketing. However, we look at Product differently than in the old school of marketing.

The old school of marketing analyses:

• Product innovation, features, upgrades
• Product differentiation, comparison, competitors
• Product variation, lines, flavours, colours

Product was a function of the product development team; the marketers where then responsible for finding a market that would buy it.

Mixed media marketing analyses:

• How a product can solve a market’s problems
• The perception of a product through marketing research
• How the product performs and is received in the market place

The new focus is on the market. Mixed media marketing works in a market place where customers choose to buy your product and are not sold to. This is how your customers purchase today.

The 14 Ps of Mixed Media Marketing – Part 2

Personality
This is part of a review of your company, brand and website. Some of the things that you will need to look at to evaluate your company’s personality are:

• What impressions and feelings does the market have towards your brand? (primary marketing research will tell you this)
• What are the characteristics, qualities and values of your brand and company?
• How are these communicated to the market?

Analysing and developing the personality of your company, brand and website is important in controlling and understanding your marketing mix. You will learn what people think about your company and industry with the goal of developing these ideas into more desirable perceptions of your brand.

It does not make sense to introduce a marketing plan of any type without an understanding of what the market thinks about your brand. With this information, you can focus your strategy on what your company needs to work on, what your market wants and the type of brand personality your market wants to buy from. This is especially important if you are selling online and rely on an ecommerce store.

The 14 Ps of Mixed Media Marketing - Part 1

Your business may be familiar with the 4 Ps of marketing: Product, Price, Place and Promotion. Focusing on 4 areas of a marketing strategy simply does not do justice to modern mixed media marketing online and offline. We represent this marketing approach in this image. How many square shapes can you see?

9? There are actually 14, so we use the 14 Ps of marketing. This is the unique foundation of mixed media marketing. In our next blog posts we will be introducing these 14 Ps to you. There is no mystery to what each of these Ps mean. It is being able to determine what are the 14 Ps and how each should be implemented into your marketing strategy that is the key to marketing both online and offline effectively. The first P is “Planning”

Planning
This first P is central to marketing. Marketing strategy is about planning based on research. A marketing plan:

• Determines the market and people to target
• Understands the business environment
• Organises the marketing activities
• Distributes the marketing budget
• Monitors the results

The marketing plan is critical to everyone involved in your company. All of your business decisions will be based on it. Keep in-mind that this is a changing document and may need adjusting according to the market’s needs or other unforeseen constraints.

Every component of the marketing strategy must be planned as much as possible. This will show that your business knows what it wants because you have researched the options and made a decision. For example; shopping around for printing or radio time at the time you need to implement a promotion will cost the business more than if it were researched and scheduled ahead of time. And the end result may not be as good because it was rushed. Messages, scheduling, design work and distribution for instance, all need planning.

It takes time to plan. But the marketing and the business will run effectively and efficiently with a good plan when it comes time for it to be implemented.

There are different types of marketing plans depending on what you need to focus on and how performance is measured. Some are very financially detailed, market share oriented or sales focused. When you think about marketing your business, think about planning. As the saying goes: Failing to plan is planning to fail.

Remember, Attractum® is right here to advise your business about its marketing plan. With over 20 years of business development experience we can draw up a comprehensive marketing strategy starting from research, product development, branding and advertising including implementation and monitoring. The full package.

Don’t Be Sucked In

Are you shopping around for Internet marketing services? Don’t be ripped off. Read this article to discover the dirty tricks and appalling approaches to search engine marketing and Google AdWords that so-called experts right here in New Zealand are pushing to you.

In our regular research of SEO services we have uncovered several website marketing companies that practice shockingly deceptive sales pitches with poor results at high cost to their customers. Unfortunately, these customers are none-the-wiser and are so overwhelmed by the concept of Internet marketing that they are easily conned into long-term contracts at extortionate prices because they do not shop around and ask the right questions.

What We Found
We have found the trend is for these search engine marketing companies to prey on the naivety of customers. Business owners and even highly reputable groups of business circles in New Zealand are being conned by search marketing companies.

These companies, usually “one-man-band” outfits, show blaring tell-tale signs of poor ethics, deception and rip-off services. Agencies with these attributes are the ones to steer clear of:

• No physical address or landline phone number on the contact page of their website.
• The agency emailed potential clients without prior permission (breaching the Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act 2007) and indicating ignorance of Internet law.
• The AdWords Qualified badge does not link to a Google page certifying that individual’s professional status. Some agencies refer customers to this link instead to deceive customers into thinking they are qualified. If they are qualified the badge will link to a page like this.
• The site of the agency has not been optimised. It does not have keywords or descriptive title tags itself. (Check this by right-clicking on the web page and selecting “view page source” [Firefox] or “view source” [Internet Explorer] and view the tag. Check the title tag at the top of the browser window).
• The agency has a complicated fee structure or charges clients by the keyword.
• You may be offered a trial period and must cancel (often in writing) before a certain time or else you are automatically locked into long-term contract at a much higher price.
• The agency has tried to take the form of Google or appear as it is working for Google.
• The agency does not offer other Internet marketing services or offline marketing services to help further promote your business. This indicates they are not familiar with marketing strategy, product development, branding and advertising.

Internet marketing is a process that should be done by marketers; not IT people, developers or web designers. Although all you may want is a great Google ad, experienced marketers can give you better value by advising you on your website, your entire marketing strategy, offline marketing and business processes.

Questions to ask your prospective Internet marketer:

• Are you a qualified Google AdWords Individual? see the unique link on their badge for proof
  
• What is your marketing background?
• What is the marketing experience of those working on my campaign?

When shopping for online marketing services, be vigilant. Become familiar with how online marketing works and what you should be paying for the amount and quality of traffic you are expected to receive. Choosing proper Internet marketers and actual qualified professionals will save you money and give you better results.

It's A Numbers Game

We went to a seminar recently that talked about the return on investment your business can gain through newspaper advertising. The particular newspaper that hosted the seminar has a plausible readership of 49,000 people. Their research claimed that 2% of their readers become spending customers on ads in their paper. So 2% of 49,000 readers equals 980 people. Attendees were then asked to calculate the average customer spend at their business and multiply this by 980 to get an idea of what revenue they could generate from a single newspaper advert! Surprisingly the room buzzed with hope as most of the attendees were amazed at the number of sales they could make by placing a newspaper ad. Newspaper advertising suddenly became small business’ answer to riding the recession.

For those of you playing at home, there are at least 8 things shockingly wrong with this logic:

1. Not all of the readers will see your particular ad
2. Of those who see your ad, not all will need or want your product
3. Where did the 2% purchase rate calculation come from in the first place?
4. Perhaps 2% buy something from the paper but not from every business that advertised
5. The industry type or demand for the product was not considered
6. The size and quality of the ad was not considered a factor in effectiveness
7. In short, attendees left the seminar believing that 2% of the readers will buy from them after they place a newspaper ad.
8. This means that today, many small businesses who received a discounted newspaper ad on this day are turning away hundreds of customers ready to buy!
   

Interestingly, the seminar did not give a single mention to the web or Internet advertising! Of course, this would be a careless thing for a newspaper to do.

If this is meant to be a comparison to Internet marketing, then 2% sounds like a possible rate of enquires caused by a newspaper ad – for a very prominent and well targeted ad. In Internet marketing this could be likened to an ad being clicked for more information. An Internet ad can easily achieve 2% of clicks (CTR) but not all of this 2% will buy. This is what the seminar implied.

It is a numbers game in all types of marketing. But in Internet advertising, your impression numbers can be as small or large as required and your response rate is higher – because it is targeted advertising. Unfortunately, at Attractum® we cannot guarantee or even suggest to you that 2% of your ad impressions will be sales. Not without taking into consideration your product and website. But we can get you 2%, 3% or more in CTR (click-through-rate).

Dozens of small business were undeniably deceived on this day - but they will find that out the hard way when they don’t get anywhere near 980 phone calls or even 980 extra website visits let alone 980 sales as a result of their brilliant newspaper ad!