Theoretical or Practical Marketing?

Hello friends!

Yesterday I was talking with a coworker, who is studying Industrial Engineering, and he is taking a Marketing course. The interesting thing is that he asked me if I could help him to answer a question that his teacher had done:

For an entrepreneur or little business, is necessary to make a complete Marketing plan/strategy?

My immediate response was ... DEPENDS. To which my friend asked me the obvious question ... Depends on what? And my next response was: It depends if you want a theoretical answer (or book answer) or a practical one.

The theoretical answer is: Yes, anyway you should make a complete Marketing plan/strategy. Otherwise how could you get the most out of every dollar you invest in marketing. You should follow roughly the following:

1 .- What is the product / service will be offered.

2 .- What is the target market of the product / service.

3 .- What is the Marketing Mix "available" to the target market about my product.

4 .- Define the strategy according to the amount you will invest.

In my perception, the practical answer would be: Not necessarily, before you invest a single minute of your time in planning your Marketing plan/strategy you have to keep in mind how much you'll invest. And depending on that, you should spend the necessary time developing the plan, and obviously how perfect it is going to be (again depends on how much do you want to spend). So the practical procedure should be:

1 .- How are you going to invest.

2 .- What is the product / service will be offered.

3 .- What is the target market of the product / service.

4 .- What is the Marketing Mix available for my budget, my product and my target market.

But in addition I would add one point, often not mentioned in the books of Marketing, which is that any plan / strategy it is just a guide. Many times our product / service with which we believe is our target market has very weak relationship, and strangely other uses and markets appear that we had not thought of. And all the time invested in our plan we can not be recovered again.

Creativity in crisis time

A German Campaign for the Sparkasse Bank, using the actual crisis time, it shows a strong insight message: Throwing your pennies to a fountain to ask for a wish. Do you copy? :” Wishes? Rather invest your money safely.

Now a days when we spoke about worldwide crisis, the opinions are very wide: invest, wait, to low expenses, discounts, strategies, etc. The point where every opinion converge is that 2009 woun´t be easy. Creativity will be helpful to pass this, using innovative ways to publish your “adds” or to communicate to your costumers, using furniture and media at lower money costs but at high “mind” costs. Take a look at what´s new, here I present these two brilliant ideas.

Got the big picture???

Marketing Evolution

This video show a little an a simple resume, how marketing were changing in the last 60 years.

Marketing on the Beach... Stamping the Sand??

Stamping the sand.

It is a marketing art, innovativa, high impact and unique (almost in Chile).
Daily when the sun rise, any beach that you chose, will wake up with ads in the sand. It is impossible avoid to see it! There are more than 2.500 impresions for every 300 meters of sand beach. There will no space in the sand without your ad!

These pictures where taken in La Serena city (Chile), and they are a real test.

The Chilean company who offer this kind of ads is ANEPCO.

The AdWords Golden Rule: 3-30-3

The AdWords golden rule (3-30-3) we can call it these way: 3 seconds- 30 seconds- 3 minutes.

3 seconds:

If you could get your ad sponsored by Google AdWords, you must get the attention of all the users of the Google Seeker for almost 3 seconds. If you get it, you are infront of the 90% of your competition!

Get the attention is a superior ability in the electronic marketing World. And 3 seconds is the time that your consumer needs (maybe less) to answer their whishes, needs, problems. Also in this time they will decide to make the second step: Clik on your ad and enter to your “landing page”.

30 Seconds:

Now our challenge is to keep interested our user, at least for 30 seconds, in the landing page. It looks like a huge amount of time, but it could be an excessive time if they are not interested.

3 Minutes:

And now, does the user make what you want him to make for the next 3 minutes? This is filling a form, buy some product or service that satisfy their needs or solve their problems, or anything that you marketing objective have.

The basic idea to implement a successful marketing campaign in the first 3 of the golden rule is… to join the 3 moments.

1.- What the costumer has in his head when he imagine his problem, needs or whishes.

2.- What the costumer write in the seeker (search intention), directly or a consequence of the first act.

3.- What he look at the ads zone.

Believe me, what the consumer has in their heads and what they will write in the search engine is not a result of magic, you can and must know it, revealing systematically seriously your market before you configure your campaign.

Determine which ad it is presented when you write your search intention in the search engine, it depends in the intelligent configuration of your campaign.

The golden prize of the golden rule is for those professionals with the first “3” and it is called Relevancy and it has two indicators (behind): Cliks rate (CTR) and quality index (IQ). There are a lot of auxiliary tools that can help you to catch the users attention, according to your market, rise your CTR and IQ, and of course maximize your financing efficiency of your AdWords strategy.