Guest post by Sol Baker

In this article you’ll learn how to…
Study the birth of trends and early adopters
Crowdsource pertinent data
Create cultural events while marketing

These days marketing is simultaneously easier and harder. It’s easier in the sense that there are a wide variety of new online tools that can equip the wayward marketer with an arsenal of powerfully efficient information gathering techniques. It’s harder in the sense that people are aware of the presence of marketing and are somewhat jaded by it. This makes marketing campaigns less effective and puts added pressures on marketing teams to come up with innovative, cutting edge strategies. But regardless of what product or service you are promoting, be it custom pens or carpet cleaning, there are ways you can market and, more importantly, gather information crucial to marketing, without being seen as infringing on peoples’ privacy. Here are three methods for doing so:

Hunting For Cool

‘Cool hunting’ isn’t new or revolutionary at this point. Youth marketing firms have been embedding researchers into niche communities for years, gleaning trends and data and using this information to create customized marketing campaigns for their clients. With the widespread growth of the Internet, ‘cool hunting’ can now be accelerated in a way that previous generations of marketers would have salivated over. Using social media, message boards, and place-based messaging out in the field, trends can be caught as they’re born and the early adopters of these trends can be more quickly profiled and monitored. Continue reading

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Guest post by Dave Mathews

Since startups and small businesses have limited financial budget, their reliance on a well thought-out marketing plan is a rarity. But the point that a marketing plan makes or breaks a business cannot be emphasized enough.

It has been reported by Forrester Research in their research that from all over the world, more than $200 billion were spent online in 2011 by the Americans alone, with an estimation of the total jacking up to $327 billion in 2016. This proves Bill Gates statement that, “the Internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow.”

It is a reported practice by some of the companies that they stress on sales before actually coming up with, or implementing, a marketing plan. This usually turns disadvantageous because, understandably, a potential client will be hesitant to buy a product/service he is not familiar with. Continue reading

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If you want to create any kind of marketing literature, from personalized emails to brochures and flyers with samples attached to it, you must have a target in mind. That target is the public segment you want to address. That group of people needs to be properly selected and the message you want to convey needs to be build around their set of ideas, principles, likes and/or dislikes.

Now that you have your targeted audience and the envelopes you want to send out are ready, you need some contact details of real people matching the image of your prospect customer. Now, if you’re product is rather expensive and you want to select middle and top managers from local companies, that sounds like a great idea. But make sure they fit your initial profile! Having the money to buy your product is not enough

Let me introduce you to the real-life failure example that triggered this post. Vichy thought to send out samples of its newest products to all women managers in Bucharest (or maybe in other cities as well). So I got one of their nice envelops with nicely printed brochures and samples of a new foundation and cream. All nice up to now.

And the weird part kicks in: I AM 26!!! I really don’t need samples of a very effective anti-wrinkle product. Really! I might be worried about preventing wrinkles and fighting some small ones annoying me, but really, seeing the photo of a 50 something woman who’s in their main target won’t help make my mind about purchasing Vichy products! I’ll just think you’re not paying enough attention to what you’re doing or that those in your MK team handling this project suck. Or that you’ve selected a cheap subcontractor to get the contact details and that shows. If Vichy’s really, really lucky, I might give the samples to my mom. Then again, I might not.

The bottom line here: keep your audience in mind throughout every step of your marketing action. Just thinking of a great concept and writing the texts to suit your target won’t do much if you then get lost on the way and the message gets to someone who’s not even close to your intended public.

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