SMG Solutions Review: Marketing Strategy's overview

July 4, 2012 - PRLog -- For businesses seeking to join the new set of global brands, there are strategies that companies need to take into account. These involve creating a strong and consistent brand culture, borderless marketing, internal hubs, a new “glocal” structure and co-creating with consumers.

With the abundance of digital platforms, it is no longer possible for brands to follow different brand strategies in different countries. Companies are being forced to adopt a more unified marketing approach.

Marketers need to rethink the term “glocal”, explains Publicis Modem’s Tony Effik. Theodore Levitt’s “think global, act local” slogan doesn’t work in a digital age in the same way, he argues. “The way we do global campaigns had to change because digital doesn’t respect borders, particularly now with social media. What we’re finding is that as content moves across borders, brand stories are crossing over internationally.”
Brands that don’t adopt a borderless approach risk becoming marginalized,People are much less aware of international boundaries than before. Digital channels are borderless media and therefore brands that operate across such media feel more pervasive and part of the world. If you look at brands like Nike, Adidas, Coca-Cola and McDonald’s, they are everywhere and have local strength and identity, but also consistency across markets.”

With this increased interconnectivity, markets that were previously seen as second or third tier must now be treated in the same way as top tier ones,You had a global brand operating in Uganda and you never really paid much attention to them because they didn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things? it is important for consistency across all global areas, this will maximize the product awareness and general acceptance for the brand- making it easier to market in the long run.

Build yourself an internal hub!

The need for a unified marketing team is more important than ever. Involving marketers from across the global brand in the overall marketing strategy will engender overall cohesion.
It doesn’t work to simply hand somebody a strategy and say, ‘well good luck with that’. They have to feel like they’ve had a chance to vet it, to debate it, ideally in person, with others that are equally responsible for the brand. Ultimately, they’ve got to feel like they own it. It’s not my strategy; it’s our strategy.”

The answer is to make the brand as accessible as possible and wait for consumers to come to you Rather than companies saying, ‘let’s open up shop in the Netherlands’, maybe global brands will become more organic because the tools exist for customers to draw brands to themselves.

Despite the proliferation of new media through which consumers can be addressed, it’s frequently observed that winning people’s attention is harder than ever.
To make matters worse, customers’ awareness of advertising and marketing has become more sophisticated, and they can often see beyond self-serving PR campaigns.

Nonetheless, publicity stunts can still work beautifully, generating levels of coverage and business benefit vastly out of proportion to the money spent. Below are nine of the most inventive publicity campaigns that companies have launched to gain column inches.

The sales funnel is a visual representation of the way potential customers move from being prospects to paying clients. Unlike the pipeline, it acknowledges that there will be leakage at each stage in the process where prospects are lost for one reason or another. There will always be more potential customers out there than actual customers, whatever business you are in.

A growing business needs to swiftly and smoothly move prospects through the sales funnel, plugging as many of the leaks as possible to increase its conversion rates.

Your sales funnel can be long or short (depending on the number of stages you expect to move your prospects through to win their business), wide or slim (depending on the number of prospects you’re attracting into your funnel), top heavy or almost cylindrical (if you’re really lucky), because it is as individual as the sales strategy of your growing business.

So how does this help? Any business needs to be able to assess its progress against its sales targets and establish effective ways to improve its conversion rates.
The sales funnel can provide such information. By knowing how many potentials enter the top of the funnel and how many customers buy at the bottom, you’ll be able to calculate your real conversion rates. What’s more, if you take more detailed figures from each of the different sales stages you’ll be able to see where the biggest (or most avoidable) leaks are occurring.

This information is invaluable as it allows you to adapt your processes and strategies (changing the structure of your sales funnel) to increase efficiencies. This way the sales funnel becomes both a process and a monitoring tool.
Of course, all this will be in vain if you can't get enough of the right kind of prospects into the top of your funnel. If too many of the people who enter the funnel are time-wasters, then man hours, stationery and other resources will have been unnecessarily exhausted.

To do this, first you have to understand what you are looking for in a customer. Through profiling your ideal customer, you will be better able to target your marketing efforts towards them.
Stopping the leaks
While you can't please all the people all of the time, you should try and adapt to your customers' needs, and part of this is understanding where you're losing their interest.
Is it your price, your sales people, the quality of your product or the after sales service that they don’t like? Analysing your sales funnel and the customer figures that you gather from each stage of it should enable you to identify the weaknesses in your current system.
Through this understanding, you should be able to adapt your strategy to stem the outflow of potential business that you're missing out on.