Member Article

Tips for Innovative and Cost-Effective Marketing

Every business and event whether new or existing requires cost-effective marketing. Keep the costs down is the mantra on every business owners and event organiser’s lips. So how exactly do you undertake cost-effective marketing but still manage the get the biggest bang for the money? Read on.

At the absolute core of the “how” is need to being intimate with customer behaviour, understanding how the customer of today reacts, what they see and accept and most importantly, where to find them.

The Business Schools will tell you that marketing means giving your prospective consumers a product or service that they may not even yet realise they need. How? By creating the need in the minds of your prospective customer.

B-Schools today have added a new precision weapon in marketers formidable arsenal -it is called customer focused ‘content strategy’; i.e. creating content that perfectly complements the products or services that are offered. Content strategy is built on the three pillars of feedback, advocacy, and support. These three pillars in turn are embedded in the places where their target customers are seeking and consuming content.

A key marketing tool is innovation and B-School professors love to narrate the story of a manufacturer of T-Shirts who was struggling with sales until one day, his son while looking at a design in a magazine said, “Wish I could print this design on my T-Shirt”.

In a World crowded with retailers, manufacturers and service providers; the sales battle is won by offering innovations that improve customer experience. For instance, at the height of recession and job insecurity, Hyundai not only started offering its vehicles on instalment payments but also assured its customers that if they lost their job within a year of purchase of their vehicle, they could return it without any financial penalties.

In more recent and currently highly competitive environment, Virgin America created a focus group program called ‘VX Next’, which was a group of 30 frequent flyers who were also entrepreneurs. Their role was to generate ideas for Virgin America in return for flyer rewards. Being fliers as well as entrepreneurs, they were intimate with both sides of the coin – user experience and the need for cost-effectiveness. The VX Next group resulted in some highly innovative marketing strategies.

A stellar example in use of technologies in cost-effective Lead Generation Marketing innovation was achieved by Netflix; the producer of TV content and premier online video streaming platform. Their innovative and cost-effective Lead Generation Marketing Strategies consisted of implementing data analytics of consumer viewing behaviour and demand. They termed the process “reverse engineering Hollywood” and they reaped volumes of data on consumer insights. In fact, today Netflix possess a stockpile of customer behavioural data vis-a-viz Hollywood entertainment that is totally unprecedented. They know exactly what the current trend is and they know precisely what the customer wants.

For obvious reasons, nobody out there is going to give you a 1-2-3 kind of “do this” and “do that” to achieve marketing bliss. The common thread running through all these cost-effective marketing ideas is innovation and one of the key players in this field is right here in Australia - the Marketing Academy Group. Call them today at +61 (0) 427 255 542 or visit them at http://marketingacademygroup.com.au

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Graham Burns .