Marketing

Marketing covers a wide range of activities but can be broken down into three main parts:

• Market research - making the right product choices
• Product launch - getting your product to market
• Demand creation - stimulating sales

What products should you invest your time in? Who are your customers? What features are really important to them? How can you reach them with product information? How do you influence their buying decisions?  Answering these questions wrong can make everything else you do irrelevant and lead to failure. Do you really know the answers to these questions? Are you willing to gamble with the future of your company?

Planning for successful market penetration and growth must start with a clear and accurate understanding of your opportunities for success. Before you should even start thinking about product strategies you will need to first:

While you may know the answers to some of these questions, chances are that you actually know less than you think. Even if you think you do have the answers, you need to validate your assumptions. To find out the answers you need to succeed you first need to set up a market research program and conduct the appropriate research. Sources of information  will include:

You may want to include these components and more as part of an overall marketing research program, and Center Marketing can help you collect and analyze the information you need to make informed decisions.

A successful launch can make the difference between rapid market acceptance and total market indifference. Don't leave this important task to chance!

Below are a few of the things you should be considering when you are thinking about a launch.

Creating a Launch Plan

While this seems obvious, it's amazing how many products get launched without a well defined launch plan. This happens especially often where the new product is an add-on or extension of an existing product. A launch plan is essential to any launch for a number of reasons. Without an actual plan, how can you communicate the launch plans to others? Without a plan it is all too easy to forget important steps in the launch or to miss deadlines imposed by the lead-times of specific events. A launch plan does not have to be long or wordy. In many cases, the launch plan is defined in a presentation. The key is that all the activities that are part of the launch are defined, that the owners and participants have been identified, and that dependencies and lead times have been accounted for.

Timeline

The timeline shows the master list of all the activities that are going to take place and when they need to occur. This is the primary reference of what needs to happen when. The complexity of a launch timeline will vary with the project. It can be as simple as a list of tasks kept in a spreadsheet or as complex as a hierarchical Gantt chart. For all but the simplest of launches the use of a project management tool such as Microsoft Project will significantly help organize the effort.

Buy-in from the participants

If you are going to rely on others to help you with the launch, and you will, you need to make sure that they understand exactly what is expected of them and that they have signed up for their part. Here again the launch plan is essential for defining what everyone's role will be in the launch and giving them a chance to raise issues or commit to their actions.

Define the market attraction

You have performed extensive market research. You have carefully gathered the requirements and developed the product exactly as specified. You have engaged customers as development partners, alpha, and/or beta parts to validate that the product you have developed is, in fact, exactly what they want. So you must already know exactly what your key messages should be - right? Not necessarily! Now that you have come this far it is time to take stock of all the changes you have inevitably made along the way and re-validate your key positioning statements.

Focus the message

Don't get carried away thinking of all the little market segments that you could possibly attack - focus instead on the key market segments that really matter. A single focused message will take you much farther and leverage your marketing efforts much more effectively

Field rollout

Before you can roll the product out to your customers you need to roll it out to your own field force. This will include your sales team, any VAR or OEM channels, customer support, field engineers, training, etc. - anyone who will be "touching" the customer and helping to sell the product. The rollout will need to include development of the appropriate collateral, and technical as well as sales training. If your channels are not ready to sell and support the product your chances for success are slim at best.

You will need to provide the channel with a "sales kit". This includes the collateral and information that they will need to successfully promote and sell the product. Some of this material is for Customer consumption, some is not. Sales kits will typically include:

Of course, you don't just create the sale skit and post it for the channel to find. You will need to conduct some amount of sales training to introduce your channel to the material and to help them understand how best to use it. Exercises like having the sales people actually give the product presentation, or mock sales calls with people acting as a customer, or other role-playing events really help focus the attendees on the material and provides them with the opportunity to both be judged on their understanding (useful for you to know how well they absorbed the material) and receive feedback on areas they need to strengthen (useful for them to polish their presentation and understanding)..

Customer rollout

All your other events lead up to the final one - the customer rollout. This will include a wide range of public events including, but not limited to:

• Advertising
• Press releases
• Web and print collateral
• Direct mail and/or email blasts
• Seminars/Webinars

Measuring Results

The most important part of any launch plan, and the one that often receives the least attention, is a way to measure you effectiveness. This can take a variety of forms but the metrics you select must help you to determine if you have reached your goals. The ultimate metric is, of course, sales of your new product but it is important to be able to judge the effectiveness of each individual component of your launch and not just the overall launch itself. If you engage in an activity like a seminar, for example, how many people were exposed to your product (increasing awareness)? How many leads were gathered? How many of these leads were converted into actual sales? What were the sizes of the deals that resulted from this event? Only by asking questions like these for each launch component can you judge what works and what doesn't - allowing you to fine tune the launch and make mid-course corrections as needed. If one type of activity isn't working - discontinue it. If another is successful - increase it.

Center Marketing can help you with all phases of your product launch: creating effective product collateral, ensuring channel readiness, delivering customer excitement, and tracking results.

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:

Tactical Tools

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

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.