Marketing
If your business is like most small to medium-sized businesses, you are struggling with marketing.
Unfortunately, marketing is often treated as a cost center instead of a revenue center. The problem is business owners don’t realize they are doing it wrong. Instead of planning their work and working their plan, small to medium-sized businesses are enchanted with spur of the moment “ideas” and create activities that don’t provide measurable results that can be tracked to the bottom line.
Too often, what business owners consider as marketing is really just calling a sales rep from the yellow pages and ordering an ad.
Our marketing services are designed around strategic and tactical marketing goals. They are designed to deliver the ultimate value for any business: more sales!
We separate our services into two sections: Strategic and Tactical.
Strategic– Strategic includes competitive positioning, brand strategy, distribution channels, pricing, the sales process, marketing campaigns, a marketing plan and more. The strategic portion of a holistic marketing mix identifies all of the reasons why your customers should buy from you and how your company differentiates itself from the competition.
Strategy is the most important aspect of marketing because all of your marketing messages and tactics will flow from it. Remember, if you are being harassed by your customers to lower your price, it means that when they look at the marketplace and compare what your company and your competition offer, they see no difference. When this happens, the only way a customer can choose, is to look for the lowest price.
Tactical – Tactical includes the implementation of all of the marketing devices that we have identified as profitable. This does not mean using all the marketing devices that are available. In order to reach your market, you may not ever need a billboard or a television ad. The tactical aspect of marketing is where the rubber meets the road and the action takes place.
Tactical also includes the testing and refining of the messages and advertisements we place into the marketplace for you. Remember, the difference between advertising and marketing is: Advertising is developing the creative artwork and placing that artwork into the marketplace where your customers will hopefully see it. Marketing is concerned with developing the message that the ad should deliver and testing and refining that message based upon feedback received from the ad. Hopefully by now you are starting to realize that most small to medium sized business owners only advertise. In order to ensure you are going to make money from your advertising, your message and point of differentiation has to be properly strategized. Hope is not a strategy!
