Marketing strategy
is a process that can allow an organization to concentrate
its (always limited) resources on the greatest opportunities
to increase sales and achieve a sustainable competitive
advantage.
Marketing strategy is most effective
when it is an integral component of corporate strategy,
defining how the organization will engage customers,
prospects and the competition in the market arena
for success.
Now with at said...
Marketing should be driven off of a core consumer insight. But that insight also has to be differentiating, and ownable. If not, you are just advertising your category online, and all it takes is someone with a bigger budget and better creative to co-opt your position.
It's about trackability
It's easier for the agency to talk about the viral
marketing program than explain all the nuances that
often intellectually stump their clients. It's difficult
enough to explain to them what search engine marketing
is. Viral marketing is a catch-all, a way to avoid
talking about the details and about tracking.
And that's the key-- the difference between the internet's viral marketing and traditional WOM is trackability. That is what the technical proxy allows.
Consumer insights
drive viral
Most programs relying on consumers to facilitate message distribution fail because clients want to control the message. Marketing programs that are often highlighted as viral successes were not designed as a "viral marketing program." They were simply astute marketing insights applied to reach the consumer, i.e., "There is a great core group of people who are still fanatical about 'Firefly,' even though we only ever aired a couple episodes.
Maybe we could use them as evangelists for 'Serenity'?" The consumer was both receptive to the message and willing to communicate it to others. This is the power of WOM combined with the internet and the passion of those communicating.
When an agency that is not in the vertical space
hits those nuggets of gold, it is often based on
the pre-existing consumer passion for the product.
If they were conscious of it that is great, but
what I despise is when they re-spin it back to other
clients saying, "we can do a viral marketing program
like this for you!" It is your products -- and the
consumers' relationships with them -- that will
dictate this more than the agency will.
Please, do us all a favor and stop saying you are going to create a viral
marketing program, and just go create a good marketing
program.
Don't be afraid to pull back the curtain
Companies like Nielsen
BuzzMetrics allow you to monitor what
is being said by your consumers en-masse across
the digital realm, monitoring "buzz" so you can
get the underlying pulse and measure what was once
un-measurable. Affinitive
enables you to design programs that assemble those
internet armies of advocates.
Multi-channel
marketing musts
Implementing a successful multi-channel marketing strategy requires strategic focus and a commitment to measuring results in terms of overall customer profitability and lifetime value. These essentials will help kick-start your multi-channel efforts:
Integrate your online and offline marketing functions rather than keeping them in silos.
- Extend the effectiveness of your channels by unifying customer data collected at every touch point. Push your website to your offline customer base and vice versa.
- Collect customer information through every channel and feed it back during the customer's next store purchase, through direct mail or with an email.
- Make sure buyer experiences are consistent across all channels. Multi-channel buyers expect to see the same or more offerings online than offline, and often use the online medium to support offline experiences. Promotional calendars should also be consistent, but unique online promotions can be added to maximize multi-channel customers' high purchasing frequency.
- Maintain the customer policies across channels. For example, return policies, sales credits and order fulfillment times should be the same regardless of the channel used.
- Keep your staff informed of all channel activities so they'll be prepared to assist customers and deliver the offer, regardless of the channel used to promote it.
- Encode promotional offers and channels so you can link responses and preferences to customer records for results tracking and future campaigns.
- Continually test integrated strategies developed for various customer segments. Heavy catalog and direct mail responders, for example, may behave differently from online buyers and require different communications to generate incremental sales.
- Instead of analyzing results in individual channel silos, capture transactions across all channels and allocate them to the ones that drove response using a combination of methods.
