Marketing - Shoot for the Target

So this is truly the goal of every marketing campaign. Generate leads, create awareness and have them lining up at the door. Unfortunately, this is a dream. Marketing is defined by the American Marketing Association as the activity, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large. From this definition remember one term, PROCESS. You don’t send a postcard and wham-o your rich. It is a process and needs repetition, evaluation and multiple approaches. Marketing is a plan and not something to be taken lightly. Few companies really market, most only think they are marketing. These ad-hoc attempts generate some leads, but never measure up to goals and thus the reason many companies start and stop. Generally the feeling is…we’re slow, better do some marketing. Hardly sounds like a process to me, it is more of acting in fear.

What truly needs to happen is a plan that includes: evaluation, discipline and measurement. All are necessary to get results. A marketing plan is the roadmap, and sometimes there is construction along the way so the roadmap is adjusted, but the end goal remains the same. Evaluation is where you check for the construction along the way. Maybe you are sending postcards and getting no results. Check to see what needs fixing. Is it a poor database, ineffective design or a bad offer? All can greatly affect results and need to be adjusted along the way. Discipline is where most fall short. Marketing is a process and must be adhered to. The key to a good campaign is to use multiple ways of touching your clients and prospects. This includes one-to-one marketing, e-mail blasts and PURLs or personalized Urls. All of these are capable of getting results, but when combined they reach maximum exposure. According to NAPL, 52% of people prefer to receive offers via hardcopy, that means if you ignore the e-mail and pURLS you are potentially missing half of your audience. The final step is measurement. Measurement is the key to knowing what is and what is not working. How many postcards received a response? How many e-mails were opened? How many people visited their PURL? You must measure these results constantly so you can avoid road blocks and achieve your goals the quickest.

Very few companies have the time or infrastructure to properly execute a marketing plan. Velocity Print Solutions has the expertise to help our clients get results and provide all the tools listed above. Velocity will be releasing a product in late Summer, that raps up all these steps in one concise package. The key to this product will be an online dashboard that will provide real-time results each step of the way.