Category Archives: audience

Before you start communicating you need a Marketing Action Plan

To reach your customers and prospects with your message most cost effectively and improve your Cost Per Lead you will need a plan. Your Marketing Action Plan should include the following:

1. Align each target audience with the Appropriate Offer and hence Communication Objective
2. Plan each of the target market communications throughout the calendar year.
3. Prepare a realistic marketing activity schedule based on the your budget.
4. Specify the parties responsible for execution of each initiative.
5. Record all of the necessary chronological steps to implement the communication strategies.

The Marketing Activity Schedule usually consists of an excel spreadsheet that outlines each activity, when it occurs and how much it costs to implement. Here is a hypothetical example of what one may look like with costs being omitted.

On the Marketing Activity Schedule you can also mark any important events on your marketing calendar, like trade shows, or product launches, etc.

The one page overview will provide all staff in the company with a great overview of all marketing activities, costs and timings. Together with the Marketing Action Plan, everyone will be on the same page in terms of objectives and responsibilities.

Why having a Creative Strategy is critical to your business?

The creative strategy is the translation of the brand objectives and attributes,
into communication that will:

• Grab customer Attention,
• Arouse their Interest,
• Stimulate their Desire and
• Prompt them into Action.

Having a strong creative strategy is more important for the SME which doesn’t have the corporate budget to drum in the message using the sheer weight of media dollars. An SME is also in a better position to develop a strong creative strategy:

• Unlike a big corporate organisation, an SME does not have to deal with layers of management and political games.
• In most cases there is no brand baggage.

Creative strategy is rarely used by businesses outside the large and well established Consumer Goods and Services; from FMCG to Banking, Retail, Telecommunications, Cars, etc.  B2B and Professional Services companies, and in fact most SME’s can benefit from having a Creative Strategy.

• Provides consistency which is crucial in building memorability and trust with the target audience
• Ideally, the theme is will be derived from or generate synergy with the brand name or the positioning statement.
• Allows for development of more ‘creative’ communication, which also makes it more memorable. Creative themes achieve this by developing synergy between words and graphics and thus become more memorable.This means that you do not have to expose your target audience to your message as many times as you would otherwise with ‘average’ or less interesting communication, which means you can spend less money communicating with your prospects to turn them into customers.
• Well communicated THEMES deliver greater marketing ROI because they go beyond features and benefits in the mind of the prospect and engage them emotionally as well as logically.

The more creative the communication, the more memorable and comprehensible it is. Which means that you do not have to expose your target audience to your message as many times as you would otherwise with ‘average communication’.

A consistent THEME that uses the name of the brand or its positioning or ultimately both will always yield better results in achieving the above objectives.

MORE CREATIVE = LESS FREQUENCY = GREATER ROI