So you have a product or service that you are trying to sell. The avenues that you could take in order to market your product or service are innumerable. So what do you do? Do you use TV, radio, print, direct mail, interactive (online) marketing, telemarketing, yelling really loudly from your street corner?

First of all, as stated in previous posts, you need to take a step back from the medium (print, web, radio, etc.) and strategically look at your brand. What kind of company are you? Do you have any distinct features that stand out from competitors? Who is currently buying your product or service? What demographic do you think would resonate with your product or service?

TIP: This all comes down to targeting your audience. By answering some of the questions above (not a complete list there), you can start to figure out who your company should be marketing to. It is not a good idea to think that you should market to everybody because that is impossible and a waste of valuable resources. Instead, figuring out the audience that you should go after will create a situation where you are maximizing your marketing dollars and give you a greater return on your marketing investment.

-jeremy

There is often a tendency within business to want to tell the public everything about itself or tell the public what to think. While this might actually be the way to go for some product-oriented marketing, let me give an analogy of what this might do for service-oriented marketing.

Imagine that your public viewing audience is another person that you are meeting for the first time at a party. The easiest way to cause a person at a party to NOT ask any questions about you would be just tell them everything there possibly is to know about you immediately. Not only is this slightly uncomfortable, it does not invite the person to engage you in a conversation.

TIP: Especially within the service-oriented business world, the goal of marketing is to be a catalyst to engage your potential clients in a dialogue in order to gain the trust of that potential client. It is usually only after trust has been established that a potential client moves to become an actual client. Trust comes from interaction or conversation and marketing is the opening line of that conversation.

-jeremy

We live in a culture where we are bombarded by messages. Every product or service has their logo stamped on what they do, commercials remind us to buy things that we never knew we needed and the consumer is in the middle of it all. In such a competitive market for the consumer’s attention, how do you stand apart?

Simplicity and uniqueness are a good place to start. Focus on a simple, easy to understand message that highlights your unique characteristics as a business. It is OK to not tell the public everything there is to know about your business from the beginning. Giving too much info will cause the heart of what you do to be lost within the sea of messages. I made a quick grahpic, below, to highlight how this sort of marketing can be utilized.

-jeremy