How to Create a Custom Marketing Plan that Works
Business owners and market planners want one thing from their marketing plan: a noteworthy influence on the growth of their brand. Creating a custom marketing plan with a promotional mix tailored to their audience allows the company to maximize their potential to reach customers, influencers, and prospects through their most used media channels. Market planners should know best of all that exposure generates traffic and revenue. This can be achieved by increased reach and frequency of advertisements, as well as personalized content tailored to your customers.
A marketing plan should include the latest opportunities to create a promotional mix that works best to communicate with your target audience. Using the most popular media channels, marketing directly to your customers, utilizing digital sales promotions, encouraging public relations, and generating publicity are some of the methods you may find your marketing plan needs to incorporate. The data that comes with an online following is also not to be overlooked.
Find which of the promotional methods below work best for your business, and keep in mind the treasure trove of customer data available in the online and mobile community.
A Reliable Online Presence
Being online in a digital world is akin to breathing air in an oxygen-filled world – it is vital for survival! Every business should have an online presence, and nowadays just having an out-of-date desktop website doesn’t cut it. Your old website may need an overhaul to better appeal to viewers, enhance your visibility, and maximize your results in search engines. Algorithms for search engines are always changing, which means having an updated website is essential to staying on top of the ranks.
Content is and will always be the largest quotient in the algorithm for search engines, so much so that 70% of your rank depends on the relevance of the words on your site. Providing original and compelling content is so important that MaxGroup has MaxGroup Media, a media and Tier-1 news outlet company dedicated to it. Another factor affecting a business’s results may be the backlinks (links on other sites) that lead to your site. If your website has a link on a less trustworthy site, Google will know and lower your ranks in search results. MaxGroup also focuses on building trust with Google’s search engine and making backlinks to your domain on the most reputable sites, including Google News.
Mobile websites are also increasingly important to companies who wish to promote themselves online. Web developers have coined the term “mobile first,” meaning websites are now being designed with mobile-optimization as their primary concern, followed by tablets and desktop devices. Search engines have also caught on to this trend and fixed their algorithms to pull up mobile-friendly websites first, even before expertly designed desktop-only domains. Having a consistent, responsive, and highly-visible website, as well as keeping that site up-to-date, is key to a contemporary marketing plan.
Direct Marketing & Digital Sales Promotions
Direct marketing is a business’s opportunity to speak directly to their customers through their most personal channels. This method involves you bringing your business to your customers or sending your customers straight to your business, and mobile marketing has proven to be the fastest way to achieve these goals. Automated mobile messaging campaigns allow a business to create a two-way conversation for their audience that becomes a customized experience for those involved, all the while promoting the brand. QR codes are also a trendy way to link consumers directly to your website (which should be mobile-optimized) or send them product information and promotional offers.
Implementing a few lines of direct communication into your marketing plan is a sure strategy for an active promotional mix that works, but take heed of how powerful digital medium is over paper. The cost of online marketing is fractions of the cost of paper and other traditional distributions. The art of clipping coupons is going the way of scrapbooking – it’s not disappearing, it’s going digital because it’s easier! More than that, though, people love finding useful goodies online, while they are “connected.”
The online world is the new frontier, with an ever-changing landscape and treasure to find and share. Finding a deal online is an exciting moment, like finding a gem in the dirt. Except, with the use of text-to-join keywords and mobile clubs, you can polish that gem and send it straight to them with their name on it and a personalized message. That’s the power of direct digital marketing. Mobile coupons, reward and loyalty programs, and other digital offerings are great ways to customize your marketing plan with direct promotional techniques.
Publicity and PR Publicity and good public relations are at the heart of brand marketing. Marketers and business owners should be well-versed with the latest and greatest social and technological opportunities in public relations. Generating a positive buzz and staying synced with your customers has never been easier. With the ability of social media, mobile connectedness, effortless digital customization, and online media distribution backing your public relations strategy, you are bound to expand your following and meet your publicity goals.
Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are veritable conduits for public relations and publicity. Facebook and Twitter feeds provide a steady flow of contact that has the potential to reach across the globe, if that is your goal, or just the people within your own community. The wide-spread reach and communal vibe of social media are essential tools for marketers who wish to customize their marketing plan with an undertone of public familiarity and social involvement. Mobile notifications alert your followers when you update your feed, so your closest customers stay tuned in to your developments whether they’re online or on the go.
Additional mobile features can personalize the experience for your customers and build rapport. Imagine sending your customers coupons in the mail… that’s not very fun. Now imagine sending an automated mobile eCard to a customer that goes something like, “Hi Dave, we heard it was your birthday and wanted to help you celebrate! Here’s a 20% off coupon for your next visit.”
Dave might tell his friend Carl about your brand and the sweet deal he got on his birthday. Carl signs up for your mobile messaging club using your text-to-join keyword and instantly receives a coupon for signing up. Carl discovers another of your automated keywords that answers with one of several fun or inspiring messages from your shuffle responder. He shares it with his sister, who also joined to be a part of your customer reward and loyalty program. The close engagement between your business, your customers, and their friends and family works because it is a fun and mutually beneficial experience – people like to share that fun.
Press Releases Press releases are a more serious broadcasting tool for generating publicity for your brand. They provide essential news to your audience about company developments, product information, promotional offerings, and anything your business would like to announce. They are a great way to spread the word, but forget the newspaper and mail altogether – it’s time to go paperless.
News and media today is not just a paper delivered to your door. People now turn to their computer screens to read headlines on the thousands of different news sites, online magazines, mobile apps, and professional blogs available at their fingertips.
MaxGroup Business Solutions distributes digital press releases using our vast network of online media publishers. With a strong press release, your words won’t just reach a few of your prospects – they’ll have a chance to be featured on the most well-known media giants (such as ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, CW), hundreds of news sites including Google News, and thousands of business blogs, reaching millions of viewers across the nation.
Whether it is a small announcement or a heavily circulated press release, developing a solid strategy for alerting the public of company news can be a critical factor in your promotional mix. Every marketing plan should incorporate some form of press distribution through the relevant news outlets, but you can decide for yourself depending on the type of announcement how widespread you’d like the coverage to be.
Data for Refining Your Marketing Plan & Broadening Your Reach Truly not to be overlooked, the ability for information to be collected by digital means is an impressive and powerful tool for marketers. The data you collect will be priceless when it comes time to revise your marketing plan, allowing you to focus your promotional efforts where they are most effective. Online Sign-Up Pages (OSPs) are a great way to collect customer information, fill your database with the data you need to better target your prospects, and broaden the reach of your marketing efforts.
MaxGroup offers several options for OSPs, such as our standard sign-up page (which you can link to from your website to collect your customer data), a sign-up page you can embed in your own website, and a Facebook widget that collects information from your friends, fans, and other visitors to your page. But, remember when I said earlier to keep in mind the treasure trove of customer data available in the online and mobile community? That’s because several of the features listed above effortlessly collect data as your customers engage with your promotional content.
QR codes allow a company to track the number of scans and mobile sign-ups, as well as automatically store mobile numbers so you can send offers and product information. Mobile messaging campaigns can also quickly collect data using keyword data capture techniques that allow customers to text their name, email address, whether or not they like Italian food, and other advantageous information right into your database. By collecting additional information (such as their taste in food), companies can refine their campaigns to send their subscribers content based on their answers.
A shrewd use of digital approaches to promotion can give your marketing plan the edge that it lacks. Social and technological strategies prevail in today’s marketing world, and a custom marketing plan must contain a promotional mix that takes advantage of the tools available in online, mobile, and social media marketing. MaxGroup provides just that, offering more traffic to your site, an interactive customer experience that suits the needs of your brand, and exposure in major marketing venues. It’s always good advice to start small and build upon your successes. Once you see results, then you can decide how big you would like to go.
If you haven’t been taking advantage of all of the strategies outlined above, you are already behind the curve. MaxGroup Business Solutions will assemble a custom made plan to fit any budget – and one that will increase your ROI that will more than cover the fee to MaxGroup.
Contact MaxGroup today: www.MaxGroupBusiness.com or (888) 670-7771.