I've to collect a list of international marketing
strategies/ideas/techniques that have to be smart, original and concrete.
I bring to you three good example of the kind of ideas I'm looking for
(I'm wffully sorry about my bad english)
1) Co-Marketing
Stretch your marketing dollar, reach new markets, by cooperating with
others dozens of possibilities.
Your marketing dollar goes a lot farther when you cooperate with
others. Look for a good synergy of products, and you'll not only slash
your costs, but also provide added value to your customers.
There are a thousand possibilities for co-marketing; here are a few:
- Include fliers in each other's outbound shipments
- Cross-link your web sites
- Share space at trade shows (I've organized 18 publishers to share
space at the American Library Association annual convention this June.
We're dividing the cost of a $650 table, plus we'll have enough on the
table to make people stop and look?which would not be true if I just
had my two titles)
- Share the cost of postage and printing for direct mail campaigns (in
my book, I explain how to do this for as little as a nickel per
participant)
- Gather together products from different companies that complement
each other, and market them as a package
2)Boost your business by doing a little shopping?undercover, of course
Thomas Stemberg, the CEO and founder of Staples, is addicted to
shopping. Despite the fact that he heads an $11 billion store chain,
Stemberg continues to shop the competition in person, sometimes even
enlisting family members to help?including his mother-in-law, who, he
says, "was a regular shopper at Office Depot's delivery business to
help me learn how it worked."
Shopping the competition is one method of stimulating growth and
innovation for your retail operation. It's easy, do-it-yourself
research that can help you find your marketing edge by monitoring
service from the customer's perspective.
Mystery shopping is an early warning system for any business that
relies on extensive public contact.
Getting the most out of competitive store visits means having clearly
defined objectives and knowing what matters most to you and your
customers. A clothing store owner, for example, might shop her
competitors to compare prices, the variety of sizes and styles in
stock, store hours, store clerks' friendliness and the way customers
are greeted. With a good shopping program, you experience your
competitor's store the way customers do, then apply the best of what
you learn to your business.
Also shop retailers outside your industry. Laura Livers, president of
Shop'n Chek, a mystery shopping firm in Atlanta, recommends finding a
company in a noncompeting field that faces similar operational
challenges, such as handling phone orders and comparing their tactics
and techniques so you can develop ways to improve yours.
Stemberg suggests small retailers study the tactics used by leaders
outside their industries?"such as the Wal-Mart greeter," he says?and
learn to emulate them.
The other side of shopping-based research takes place in your own
store. Mystery shopping is an early warning system for any business
that relies on extensive public contact. Because poor service is most
often cited as the reason for loss of sales, consider hiring a mystery
shopper to evaluate the experience your store offers. Professional
mystery shoppers go to businesses posing as ordinary customers and
then provide evaluations of their experiences using written
questionnaires and reports.
"A successful mystery shopping program can evaluate and measure the
product knowledge and skills of salespeople," says Livers, whose
company has nearly 30 years' experience and 90,000 shoppers throughout
the United States. She says a visit from a mystery shopper is a
"snapshot of time, and the more often you shop, the more you fill your
photo album and start to identify strengths and weaknesses."
Before starting a mystery shopping program, understand what your
customers want. Suppose you own a store that sells energy-efficient
windows and doors. Mystery shoppers can't help you build sales over
the long term if the product quality is poor, and they can't tell you
what your target market wants from your business or products. But they
can help ensure that people who come in to shop for windows are waited
on promptly and courteously and that the sales information is
presented consistently. "Identify what the consumer wants and build a
training program around meeting their expectations," says Livers.
3) sneaky marketing strategies to help you beat your competition by
turning their own strengths against them
Traditional marketing classes spend a lot of time talking about market
share?and quite frankly, I've never really understood this. In my
mind, if you're meeting your sales and income goals, what does it
matter if other businesses are also succeeding?
But sometimes there's a situation where a competitor comes in
determined to drive you out, and brings a huge amount of firepower to
bear: massive ad campaigns in the Yellow Pages, local newspapers, and
so forth.
So what's a small business owner to do? How can you survive an
onslaught by a well-funded competitor who doesn't understand that
there's enough to go around?
Try a little marketing jujitsu. In jujitsu, as in many martial arts,
you turn your attacker's strengths to your advantage, and can flip
someone much larger than you over your shoulder and onto the mat.
Say a large chain store has moved in, and spent aggressively on Yellow
Pages advertising that dwarfs your little ad. Figure out a promotion
that can harness their muscle to your advantage: such as half off or
two-for-one if the customer brings in your competitor's Yellow Pages
ad. Voila, you have physically removed the ad from many of the phone
books in your area?maybe even all the phone books, if your offer is
good enough! And your competitor is still shelling out thousands of
dollars a month for an ad that no one sees! (Of course, don't try that
strategy if your ad happens to be on the back of theirs!)
You may not make much profit on those individual sales, but think of
it as a marketing cost. You are actually buying back the competitor's
advertising, for pennies on the dollar! By the time they figure out
what you're doing, your strategy will be well underway?and when they
switch to, say, newspaper advertising, you'll have a trick up your
sleeve to neutralize that as well.
I need at least 10 more great ideas. |
