In today’s digital world everything changes minute-by-minute, which can make it hard to decipher what’s worth the investment and what is not when it comes to your marketing. Buyers are consuming new information every single day, so how exactly do we capture and keep a buyer’s attention?
Are you customers reading about you or your competitors?
As average Australians, we are spending more and more time each day on-line. We can't get enough of our smartphones! So when your customers (or prospective) customers are hanging out online, are they hanging out with you? Vanilla is great for ice-cream, but not for branding.
I don't hate vanilla, in fact I love it! What I do hate is bland. Bland is simply not something you want to associate with your marketing activity. Whether you're working on your brand promise or brand delivery, there is no room for vanilla. EVER. You can spend heaps of money on a fantastic marketing campaign with a professionally produced television ad, matching radio ads, great print ads and a digital campaign to compliment your efforts, only to have it all fall over when you have a potential new client walk into your store and experience poor customer service.
Too often organisations spend their entire marketing budget on the big stuff and forget about frontline staff training. When the whole objective of your position is to drive traffic to your business door, don't forget about who they will meet when they get there. I am often approached by clients to assist them with their marketing. One of the key steps in assessing where they are at (before we start looking at where they should be), is reviewing previous campaigns and results. I have found that sometimes the really clever campaigns that are tricky, funny or ultra-creative aren't delivering the required business results.
There can be a number of reasons for a marketing campaign falling short, however one of the key themes I have witnessed lately is brand misalignment. Someone will be seen as the expert in your field. So why not you?
In this context, an expert is not someone who calls themself an expert, but someone who acts as the expert. It's not about claim, it's about behaviour. Planning your marketing activity is a task we all do in some form or another. For small business owners, sometimes it is a list in their mind of what happens when. For more sophisticated organisations it is a written plan or schedule complete with resource allocations. Whatever type of plan you use, it is vitally important to ensure you look at it with the right lens.
We can get very carried away in planning social media activity, public relations activity, tv campaigns, in store campaigns, newsletters, internal campaigns and very soon we see the marketing calendar is full. Taking the next step to review the plan through different a different lens can add power to your planning and ensure your efforts will be effective. Above the line marketing is generally the marketing activity that is traditional in nature and requires some money to bring it to life. For example, TV advertising, gift with purchase campaigns, google adwords etc. In contrast, below the line marketing is the marketing that doesn't necessarily cost money, but generally takes time and can be done in house. For example, how customers are greeted with they arrive, communications on the bottom of our email signature, newsletters etc.
Because above the line marketing requires budget allocation, it is naturally respected, well planned, executed by professionals and reviewed regularly. Often the time we allocate into managing our below the line activity can be not as well respected, managed or reviewed because it isn't a separate line item on the profit and loss statement. This is a common approach by many organisations, however those organistations who take the time to work out the difference between above the line and below the line marketing and treat each activity with the same level of respect, whether it's on the profit and loss statement as a separate line item or hidden in your wages bill, can see great results and a positive impact on sales. |
AuthorRoxanne Grey |