Planning marketing activities
Any person who wants to run effective advertising campaigns should remember to properly plan and tailor his actions to the market. This was well described by Sun Tzu in The Art of War. To paraphrase his words “He who knows his customer and knows his product will not be threatened though and a hundred clashes”. This, of course, is not about fighting customers, but about effectively acquiring them.
How do you identify audience groups?
Even before starting marketing activities, it is essential to determine what we have and who our offer is aimed at. Proper identification of the customer groups we want to reach is essential if we want to succeed in marketing. The basic information to be collected : – Who will be interested in the offer? – What will be the geographic reach? – How does the offer look against the competition? – What do we want to achieve? This information can be more, of course, and may depend on the specifics of the market. The simplest examples of defining audience groups might be:
– a distributor of agricultural machinery is looking for farmers in its region,
– a person running a pizzeria is looking for customers in his area or delivery range,
– a seller of building materials is looking for people planning renovations or construction companies that do such work,
– a manufacturer of women’s cosmetics is looking for women who care about their appearance and are looking for beauty products,
– a person running an online store with children’s assortment is looking for people with children in the country. These are simple definitions of the audience, but they can significantly help in targeting marketing efforts.
Online campaign objectives
Already knowing what kind of product we have and knowing our audience, we need to determine what we want to achieve through an online campaign. When conducting marketing activities we can target different goals, the most common are: – direct sales of products and services on the Internet,
– building brand awareness. The goals and their combinations are, of course, many but their knowledge is not mandatory for everyone. Agencies and marketing specialists are responsible for matching the methods of action to the goals we want to achieve, and it is they who should know how to act to achieve the desired goals.
How to increase online sales?
Wanting to sell our products on the Internet, we need to set our sights on reaching people who have a specific need or are already familiar with our offer. These are informed users who will be interested in what we have to offer. Google gives here the opportunity to use many proven tools to achieve this goal. Acquiring informed customers is very well helped by the Google search engine itself, which allows us to reach people searching the Internet. Natural SEO, search advertising and product advertising work very well for achieving most sales goals. In addition, remarketing as a form of reaching people who have left the purchase path also works well for gaining sales conversions.
Building brand awareness
Direct sales may not always be what we care about. Sometimes the marketing goal that is set before us is to build brand awareness. This is an activity aimed at showing and making the recipients aware of who we are and what we do. This is a good solution if we are new to the market or want to support offline activities. It doesn’t always have to be level awareness building: – If diaper is Pampers,
– If credit is Stork,
– If shopping is Shopee. The activity can be smaller in scope and targeted to a local audience. The effect we want to achieve is: – If a pizzeria it’s our neighborhood one,
– If a hairdresser it’s in an establishment by the traffic circle,
– If a move it’s by a well-known bus. To achieve these goals, you need to use different marketing tools such as banner advertising, video or social media. They allow you to reach people who in your region may be interested in your offer.
Mistakes during campaign planning
A common problem when preparing a strategy for marketing activities is misidentifying the audience. When asked “To whom do you want to sell your product?” I have often heard “To everyone.” While this may make sense with everyday products delivered all over the country, in the case of specialized services such as a truck mechanic operating in a specific city, such an answer can be severely under-specified. Another problem that often arises is the exuberant idea of marketing efforts. A good example would be the situation of positioning pages on Google where such texts are not uncommon: “But why isn’t my car dealership’s website first in the results yet? The site of my aunt’s friend’s daughter, who has a hair salon near Warsaw, was at the top in Google after just 2 weeks.” Keep in mind that different audiences are reached by different methods, and the effects depend on the interest of the offer in the market and the actions of the competition. When conducting certain activities, you need to be patient. Another problem is a situation in which someone orders activities, but does not quite know why they are doing it. Common topics are:
– I want an ad in Google because my competitors have one,
– I paid X thousand zlotys for this website, but I don’t see it in Google,
– a friend made me a campaign in Google Ads, I spent money and got nothing out of it. This is a common result of actions without setting specific goals. Do you need a campaign to support sales or do you just want to show up in Google? Define that in your goals and get the right actions to match. Do you order a website to be pretty and present your offer in an interesting way? No problem you can build one, but that doesn’t mean that this pretty site will effectively rank in Google or will effectively sell products from your offer. This often requires additional activities, which sometimes need additional planning before the project starts.
Marketing support
Problematic situations are common in the market. Of course, this is not necessarily a symptom of the ignorance of advertising agency clients. They are specialists in their field and in their industry they need to show competence. When running a hairdressing store, an online store or producing mechanical parts, they don’t need to know anything about marketing. That’s what professional marketing agencies are in the market for. What is needed for smooth operation is, first of all, clear communication and precise definition of marketing goals. Knowing what the customer wants to achieve and what they have at their disposal can determine the solutions to be implemented.
