Successful marketing strategies don't come easy. You need to plan ahead and pick your players wisely, says Paul Kavanagh....
Those of you with sporting knowledge will be familiar with the idea of a manager picking a team based on mixed skills and directing it to play to a tactical game plan in order to defeat the opposition. However, as we have seen recently with Kevin Keegan and the England team, despite having a high degree of skill within his team, you don't get the desired result unless the tactics are right.
This is also true with marketing. In fact, marketing has some close analogies to a team sport like football. Key to footballing success is a knowledge of the opposition and of one's own strengths, enabling the development of a tactical plan. Likewise, knowledge of the marketplace, your customers and unique selling points (USP) enables a marketing strategy to be devised. Team success increases gate receipts and sponsorship, while good marketing increases sales and revenue.
Football scouts look for the best players and similarly marketing professionals look for the most effective media. Football managers deploy their best players within a tactical plan and adjust these during a game while marketing professionals use the best mix of media and adjust this mix according to the success of campaigns.
The marketing professional becomes familiar with the range of marketing options and media available and assesses each accordingly – the size of the audience, profile, cost effectiveness, flexibility, benefits, USPs and drawbacks of the medium.
Having scrutinised and understood all the options, the best mix of media can be chosen. However, an integral part of this decision process has to involve the tactics that will be used to make them interact effectively to achieve the desired result.
Unfortunately, unlike sport, the marketing result is often less obvious and its success can be more difficult to determine. Marketing professionals try to make campaigns as measurable as possible to determine the impact of their plan against their goals. Like sport however, the tactics often need to be changed mid-campaign to react to new competition and exploit opportunities. It is vital to be aware of market changes and deviations from the planned activity, and to be in a position to respond or modify tactics accordingly – to have a plan B, C or D.
So what media options are there available to the marketing professional? The two main types can be differentiated as:
Above the line:
Below the line:
Utilising one or more media channels is where the real tactics begin. Developing an integrated marketing approach is about picking the right media, planning how the individual components interact and setting up an activity plan. When setting goals the following should be considered:
No matter what combination of media is chosen, what message, what creative element, or what audience is targeted – all decisions that are made need to reflect the product. These are the four "Ps": product, price, promotion and place.
Finally, if in doubt about a particular communication, letter, leaflet, advert or commercial, there is one test worth considering – the AIDA principle. Does your communication meet the following test?
However, does it work? Think of an advert on TV. What was it that got your attention? What held your interest? Did you get to the desire stage? From how many adverts can you remember the music, the guy and the setting, but not the product? Or worse still, have you ever bought the product? And if not, why not? Frequently, the answer is simple:
So, in football you can pick the best players, and in marketing you can pick the best media, but unless you have the right tactics, the best striker in England may get in front of the goal but it doesn't mean he'll score. And so it is with marketing.
