Creating Demand For Your Products

  • Develop Awareness of your product
  • Create Interest in your product
  • Instill a Desire for your product
  • Direct Action to purchase your product

Increase demand yields increased sales as new customers are exposed to your products, leads are gathered, and existing customers are encouraged to proliferate your products. A good demand creation plan will help you execute various demand creation events ranging from simple mailers to seminars to trade shows.

Start with a focus on the unique sales proposition for your product. What differentiates you from your competitors? How can you grab and hold your customer's attention? Studies validate what common sense tells us - the more complex the message or the more messages you have, the less recall the customer will have. You need to develop a simple, concise message about your product that will resonate with your customers and be easy to remember.

Next, you need to determine how to best reach all of your potential customers. You want to insure a wide dispersion in your communication efforts to maximize the number of unduplicated leads for each communication vehicle that you use. Your goal is to deliver the lowest possible cost per the highest number of unduplicated targets for our communication plan.

Finally, you want to make sure that your marketing plan includes a variety of tactics that will support the different cycles in the sales process. We can broadly categorize these into three main areas:

  • 1:many – awareness: broad message, light content
    • These activities are targeted towards the mass market and are designed to stimulate general awareness. The message is typically broad and is distributed to a wide audience, many of whom are not potential customers. These are generally delivered with no customization of the content since they are being broadcast to a wide audience.
    • Examples include press releases, advertising, and trade magazine articles
  • 1:some – desire: refined message, more detailed content
    • These activities are targeted towards  a smaller crowd of people who have been identified as potential customers. They are already aware of your product to some degree and want to learn more about it. These are delivered with little or no customization.
    • Examples of this type of activity include seminars, workshops, and webinars
  • 1:1 – focus message, detailed content
    • These activities are targeted to an individual customer and are usually customized to match that  particular customers interests.
    • Examples of this type of activity include on-site lunch’n’learns

Tactical Tools

There are many tactical tools that can be used to reach potential customers, including

  • Advertising including trade news, magazines, radio, tv, billboards and others
  • Customer testimonials: print and video
  • User Group Meetings
  • Direct Mail
  • Email
  • Feature articles, Product release notices, editor interviews
  • Press releases
  • Speeches at trade events
  • Customer Newsletters
  • Seminars
  • Hands-on workshops
  • Trade-shows
  • Web sites
  • Webinars
  • On-site events: "lunch'n'learns" and other tactics

You need to make sure that you use your promotional budget effectively  by reaching the right audience with the right message. To sum up the key components of a successful demand creation plan: right message: right message, right target audience, right communication tactics.

Center Marketing can help you to develop an effective and efficient demand creation plan and execute on all of the components, ultimately delivering increased sales and market share.

 
 		  
 

© 2009 Center Marketing, LLC