First stage of the marketing process

[greenoak]

what a good excercize......... it hits what we try to do all the time...keep them in mind more than how neat we are........our main marketing idea right now is ... save money with style...im using it a lot, in talk and ads..... also i like ....a fun place to shop....
i think its so good to think about them more than us..altho it doesnt come naturally.....
if i had to list 5 things on the minds of my main target.....HOME OWNERS UNDER 40.....IT WOULD BE...
money and value, saving money
style, on trend, adventure,
green, recycling,
fun of shopping, refuge, cheap thrills
quality and uniqueness
ann

[handprop]

I find myself once again out of time. Politics is a 24 hour job and I’m writing strategy 14-16 hours a day and wish I could have more time to help some of you folks out. Over the years I feel as if I have read every marketing book available and the one thing I have learned is they all fell short of providing any answers. One reason for this is most authors have never really had to create a marketing SYSTEM for a major corporation and all most books do is just scratch the surface of the whole marketing puzzle.

The list of five is something I learned from a senior marketing executive from a 700 million dollar a year company. Actually I learned many things from him.

The most important lesson I learned is being very observant of what works and what doesn’t. Over the course of time I developed a system of marketing that works for every company and every situation. The problem is I never had time to write it down and it’s just all in my head. If I had more time I would write it all down and give it away. Some of the stories I could tell are really amazing.

It’s 12:00 at night and I just read Ann’s post and thought I would make a quick comment. The list of five is very important and works as an aid to keep us on task but let’s take a minute and explore that a little deeper.

When looking at the list of five we can learn a little more about marketing than meets the eye. As I explained earlier it keeps us on track, but more importantly it allows us to maximize our marketing effort, otherwise known as return on marketing effort (ROME). Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know it’s not in any books and that’s because I came up with that on my own. All it means is marketing takes a certain amount of energy or effort if you will, and if we can maximize our input we can then maximize our output.

Example of ROME:
Let’s pretend for a moment we have a blank sheet of paper and that’s our only marketing vehicle. Basically, we have an 8 ½ x 11 sheet of paper that contains 93.5 square inches of space that we can work our marketing magic. ROME is nothing more than a method of guaranteeing we maximize the largest percentage of the 93.5 square inches as possible. Most of us can imagine a headline, offer, introduction, body, conclusion, call to action, etc. but does it end here? No way, and that is where most companies and marketing groups fail.

Marketing never ends and must always be measured for effectiveness. If you write an offer does that mean you’re done? No, the new question is how strong is the offer? Think of ROME as continuous improvement of the marketing effort. Use the list to create a marketing vehicle but don’t forget to keep using it for the same marketing vehicle over and over. When I develop a marketing vehicle it’s just a guess but the list can help get me close. My goal is always to maximize effectiveness on the fourth or fifth round and the list of five is always used.

If we develop the 93.5 square inch marketing vehicle into what we feel is about perfect then use it for a couple weeks and measure the results…..you are measuring results right? Once we have measured our result, that’s when the list of five becomes even more important. Remember the goal of marketing is to increase the effectiveness of the vehicle not just design it and walk away making blind assumptions. Instead grab the list of five and look for wasted square inches. On a typical advertisement how much of the copy is not working for you to create a customer? It’s never 100% but how much is it?

Wasted square inches are on every advertisement so it’s easy to discover. I was visiting a front page of a website the other day and I almost burst into laughter. What I found was a big photo that doesn’t represent anything having to do with creating a customer. It was about 3 x 4 inches, that’s a whole 12 square inches…….wasted. Photos are not bad but the wrong photo is. If we have 93.5 square inches available and we just wasted 12 square inches that’s 13% of the total space not working for you. So how did I know it wasn’t working? Well, I just looked at the site and knew right away what the list of five was and when I looked at the photo nothing about it qualified for the list of five. If your going to put a photo up be sure to qualify it!

The reason this happens is because people don’t know what to put on copy so they become creative and artistic. That’s called filler, and filler does nothing for the customer. Learn to use the list of five and learn to continually evaluate using the list. Over the course of time the results are amazing. Putting garbage on advertisements for filler is amateur, use your list of five to keep you from doing that!

Mike