Marketing goals provide the direction of your marketing campaign. Without goals, it is impossible to know what needs to be done. Goals need to be long-term, broad, and provide aspirations for what you want to achieve through marketing. Once the goals are established, you need to create specific objectives and plans to help reach your goals.
Brand Switching
Increasing your market share is one of the main goals of marketing. Customers are not easily swayed from choosing a product or service they have become accustomed to and used for a long time. Having a customer choose your unknown product over your competitors known and trusted product takes a special set of circumstances. Releasing a new or improved product is a great time to make that push and poach consumers away from your competition.
Despite your goal for brand changing, customers do not always accept change easily. The transition requires effective advertising. The marketing needs to focus on improvements for the customer, but it also needs to show advantages in price, quality, and availability. Switching can also move the other way, so listen, and give your customers a voice and they will feel more connected. It will make it harder for your competition to steal your market share.
Repeat Purchases
Repeat customers are essential to your business. They make up a majority of your sales, and you can count on them to share your brand with their friends. It is important to remember repeat customers on your marketing campaign, especially since you spend less money engaging repeat customers. Repeat purchases require you to build relationships. Fortunately, there are different ways to improve relationships with customers and create repeat purchases. They are found in a variety of marketing strategies.
- Customer service
- Loyalty programs
- Incentives
- Personal communication
- Direct mail
Brand Loyalty
Brand loyalty is the loyalty that customers show to your brand. This can be seen through actions such as repurchases, and paying more for the products than competitors charge, and investing time in the purchase. Think about the lines at stores when the iPads were released. Loyal customers can be turned into brand champions for the company. Brand champions provide the word of mouth marketing that will improve the brand and increase the customer base.
Brand Champions:
- Draft them: Find satisfied customers who fully understand and appreciate your brand.
- Interact with them: Thank brand champions for their purchases, surveys, comments, and contributions, and begin building a closer relationship with them.
- Give them perks: Offer brand champions loyalty rewards and special perks for providing testimonials or sharing your brand with others.
- Listen to them: Champions provide excellent feedback. Take their praise and criticism seriously.
Inform and Educate
Marketing must do more than appeal to emotions, certain marketing methods need to inform and educate customers. The best way to inform customers and educate people about your product is through content. Content is provided through different media:
- Blogs
- Webcast
- Social media
- Newsletters
- White papers
The content needs to be relevant, interesting, and well written (or well edited in the case of a webcast). When creating content, it is important to focus on one topic at a time, and use subheadings to break up information. This will allow customers to focus on small portions of information at a time.
This post is from May’s topic on Marketing Basics, which is also a course on our Mini-MBA program online from Harvard Square.