5 Marketing Strategies that Don’t Change

Today’s post is by David Chapman – Director of Marketing at Webrageous.  Here’s David:

Musicals never go out of fashion, because the formula is well understood. It is tried and tested and everyone knows what to expect when they sit down to watch a good musical. The audience is given what they want. The marketing strategy is a classic strategy and doesn’t need to change because the audience and their desires are considered first.

Online marketing managers could learn a lot from this kind of simple approach. The old school marketing strategies should be at the top of our modern marketing plans, even though the marketing world has developed incredibly over the past ten years.

Why?

Because even though the marketing world has developed from a technological point of view, buyers are still the same. People are dinosaurs at heart. We don’t change. We approach a sale in the same way as we have always done and we will continue to approach our sales in the same way as the years sail by, because human beings don’t really change.

So… with this in mind… what are the 5 most important marketing strategies that a marketing manager must utilize when working on any campaign to ensure marketing success, even within our technologically advanced marketing world?

Audience, Audience, Audience and 40/40/20

The “40/40/20 marketing strategy” essentially explains how any kind of marketing campaign can be broken down and should be broken down in order to be fully understood. This strategy reminds us that…

– 40% of the success of a marketing campaign comes from the audience
– 40% relies on the offer or product
– 20% is affected by the creative

In simple terms this means that a marketing specialist must firstly understand who their audience is. If they don’t know who their audience is, they are never going to be able to advertise their products with success. All marketing specialists must have permission to market to their target audience and they must be aware of how to find them using all the available marketing tools and routes possible.

Once the marketer has learned how to find their target audience, they can choose the right kind of advertising message to hit them with and select the optimum time to send that message too. This is why re-marketing is one of the most successful forms of new marketing ideas over recent years.

If you are not taking advantage of re-marketing strategies in your online marketing campaigns as of yet, think again and start putting re-marketing ideas in place as soon as possible.

Recency, Frequency and Monetary Value

This simple marketing strategy emphasizes the importance of investing your marketing efforts in the right areas. The idea behind this strategy is that you look at who recently bought from you, how many times this person buys from you and therefore how much money they spend on your products within a given period of time (for example, a month).

If you can identify who bought from you recently and whether or not that same person buys from you frequently, you can definitely assume that this person is more valuable to you on a financial level than any other kind of customer.

You should be investing your marketing strategies into communicating with the people who buy and who buy frequently. If you focus your attentions on this segment of your customer base, your ROI will look healthier and healthier every single month.

80/20

The 80/20 marketing strategy is an interesting idea which treats the 80/20 divide as a magical numerical formula for marketing campaigns on many levels.

For example, you will normally find that 80% of your sales come from 20% of your customers, who are what you should refer to as your regular customers. In addition, 80% of the products that these regular customers buy is most likely to be 20% of the products that you have for sale overall.

This is because most people are pretty routine in their approach to most things in life and if they come back to buy from you, they will come back to buy the product that they have already found a use for on the majority of occasions.

On a similar note, 80% of your marketing emails, for example, are likely to be read by 20% of your audience. 80% of the Facebook posts and “likes” are likely to come from 20% of your Facebook fans.

If 80/20 is the magic formula, it pays to find out who your 80% regular audience is and what 20% of your products or emails do they buy / open. If you are aware of this information, you can use it to your advantage and spend time and marketing money where it will be best spent.

Attention, Interest, Desire and Action

Avoid sending yourself mad by analyzing your Google Analytics reports and thinking about whether you should be advertising via the Display Network, the Paid Search Network, the Mobile Network, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Blogs, blah, blah, blah, and get back to the very basics…

Have you generated the amount of “attention” needed via a creative message that is designed to attract your audience to your marketing ploy in the first place? Have you then marketed to the right kind of audience to ensure that they will be “interested” in the benefits and solutions of your product? Have you listed the information required to make your audience “desire” your product? Have you made it easy for your audience to take “action” and buy your product?

If you can answer “yes” to every single question above, every single time you market your product, your marketing campaign will be successful over time.

Making it Easy

It may sound strange, but offering 40 dollars off of a product in any marketing campaign is so much more effective than offering 40% off.

Why?

Because you are asking your audience to do math. You are asking them to figure something out, to work at something, to work, work, work.

Never ask your audience to work in any way before buying your product. Make deals easy to understand and make the benefits available to your audience as obvious to them as possible. Spell everything out. Leave no stone unturned and you’ll find that your ROI will grow.

Remember, marketing methods may have changed, but people have not. Considering the fact that we always want “people” to buy our presents, we should pay great attention to detail when it comes to attracting “people” to our products. Makes simple sense, right?

– David Chapman, Director of Marketing at Webrageous, a PPC Management Company based in Reno, is an expert in online marketing strategies.

Photo: salesman by Aaron “tango” Tang