How to market your product
Don’t Do It Just Because You Can
Work toward your objective
Today there are more ways than ever to market your product, which can make it overwhelming and confusing to choose the most appropriate and successful tactics and channels for your brand. Too often, we see brands doing a very random selection of tactics – just because they can. Or they are attempting to do too many things all at once – again, just because they can. Neither scenario typically ends in marketing success; and if by some chance one does, it’s not the most efficient way to market your product and utilize your resources.
Create a Marketing Plan
To develop an effective and efficient marketing plan, we recommend using your company’s business plan as a starting point. Your business plan is what the company wants to accomplish in 1 – 3 years as well as how, why, and when it will happen. Using your business plan as the foundation for your strategic marketing plan allows everyone to operate from a common plan and move toward the same goals.
Thus, the strategic marketing plan should align and support the business plan. Each initiative in the business plan is looked at through a marketing lens and a plan is written for it. Again, it’s what, how, why, and when…also known as objectives, strategies, and tactics. The marketing plan then becomes your filter for all those channels and tactics you will employ.
Remember, you cannot and should not do everything. This seems logical, but it’s not always easy. We can’t stress enough that planning for marketing up front and wholistically will result in a better use of your time and resources. Here are a few examples.
A company is launching a couple of new products. They can use a large array of tactics including in-store, social media, direct mail, a website – the list goes on. However, each channel and tactic will utilize financial and creative resources since the marketing assets need to be created, and then scheduled and activated (often crossing through many internal teams to accomplish this). None of that is quick and easy, and the costs start to add up fast. Instead, we recommend you look carefully at each product’s goals and pick the corresponding tactic(s) that will result in the most bang for your buck. One size fits all doesn’t work, and it wastes resources.
A small company has three focus industries. They are doing well in one, another is a bit newer to them, and the third is a stretch. Their business plan said they are going to do only what is necessary to maintain their sales in the well-established sector and shift more focus on the newer one because they see great potential there. The problem is that the marketing plan was the same as the previous year and it didn’t reflect shifting more investment into the new industry. This is an example of having a business strategy, but then not effectively aligning the marketing plan accordingly.
A third company has only a few marketers on their team and a vast marketing plan with dozens of channels and tactics. The plan has many great ideas, but the execution of the plan within the timeframe as outlined is simply not feasible with the size of the team in place. Not wanting to spend more money for additional resources or giving up on any tactics, the only option is to adjust the timeline of when things will be executed. The team realized that not everything had to launch and be ready on the same day. Spreading things out and ramping up over time results in the additional benefit of providing insights into what and what isn’t working, so they can adjust along the way.
Align your marketing with your business plan and take a step back to work with your team to identify what is going to be most impactful. Just because you may be able to implement many tactics, it’s often the case that you shouldn’t.