Red Door Interactive's president explains five strategic steps to keep brand personality and your marketing campaign focused.
A company trying to establish its product or service in today's market now has the benefit of the web as an efficient marketing tool. Quicker than ever, the web can help a company determine if its new products or services will be a success versus a flop.
For many products and services the web can directly facilitate the traditional "Four P's" in a marketing strategy: Product, Price, Place and Promotion. Every marketer needs to consider how the web will play a part in guiding the growth of the company through marketing its products or services.
This article represents my perspective on the phases of marketing in a webcentric world. In my opinion, one can't really circumvent any part of this when trying to launch a new product or new company, and I recommend that any marketer go through these steps one-by-one. Now, of course, there are caveats to each part of this, and I also think that there are foundational elements of each step that can be handled earlier in the process, but this is intended to be a brief read. Perhaps I can add more to this later.
Step 1: Capture the market share you "should own"
Insert yourself into the marketplace by being present
To be included in the consideration set within a product category, a product needs to be adequately present. This is the same thing as, in a grocery store, sitting on same shelf as competing products. Ideally, you want to be at eye-level, which is the same as being returned as one of the top results in a search engine, as well as sitting in the mix of product reviews on any number of websites.
To accomplish this, a marketer need to build a search engine optimized website and work diligently to show up in all the places where your target would look for a category of products. To show up on the brand or product name is not enough; the product should show up on a general search because with a new product prospects will not likely know the product name on which to search.
A quick way to "show up" is to use paid listings (aka, pay-per-click for Google, Yahoo! and other search engines) under the appropriate key phrases. Track the ones that are driving converting traffic and use some of that information to support search engine optimization efforts.
If the product is present, is priced reasonably and the differentiating features are basically communicated, the company will naturally capture a set of customers that firmly believe in those differentiating factors. Marketers will have to work harder in this step of the webcentric marketing process to capture those customers than later in this process, but the company will at least acquire most of the customers that are aching for your solution.
Tactics to employ in this step:
- Site analytics
- Search marketing
- Sales-driven, contextually placed ads
- Froogle API (for e-commerce)
- Public relations (placed product reviews, for example)
Step 2: Merchandise the product or service
Make sure that your prospective customer clearly understands what your product has to offer by manipulating its features and benefits to position against those of your competitors.
Once the product is present where its prospective customer is looking for a solution, a marketer will have to begin working on merchandising the product or service on the site. In this case, one must think like a retailer. The product needs to be accurately described and positioned, and then the company can encourage sales through special offers or partnerships.
At this step, it is imperative that the features and benefit of the product or service are established in extreme clarity. This is not intended to inundate the user, but give them every reason to consider this product; no bases should be left uncovered. Then, grease the skids through special offers, incentives and validating partnerships.
Tactics to employ in this step:
- Flash product demos
- Comparison tools
- Partnerships
- Promotion codes
- Public relations (to highlight marquee customers and exclusive product features)
Next: Step 3: Eliminate confusion