The basics: Promotion and Placement (after the Product and Price are locked)

Getting inside the consumers’ mind is one of the most important as well as one of the hardest things to do. There are a few key things to consider here:

• Who is the target customer
• Where are they looking for information
• When is the right time to target them
  

I work in open source software and primarily market to Developers, Architects, and System Admins. In order to create compelling campaigns around our products, I need to first learn how these functions like to consume information. Through user groups, interviews, and other research I’ve learned that Developers spend a lot of time in different online publications when trying to evaluate products – now, I post ads and content in these different publications around product evaluation and entry level information. I post up-selling ads and content in more of the denser content – up-selling on external publications when someone is just doing research would miss the mark completely.

In order to revamp our community website, I recently led a "usability study" to learn how developers (the target audience for that site) found the site, where they went on the site, and the things that were compelling them to click. My objectives with the site are to drive downloads, enable faster on-boarding getting people up and running with our products, and drive people to register (so I can then "drip" them ... much nicer term for "spam). During the study I saw people doing a lot of searching on "our product vs. xyz." Once on the site I noticed they were going to the "free" docs first, then the projects, then the download. This study helped vastly with the site update. More on usability studies later.

In a business to consumer setting, this could be seen in something as simple as shopping. When I go to the grocery store, I expect to see ads and banners around good healthy food and easy meals to make for my family. I do not expect to see restaurant ads cross-selling their meal delivery nor would I expect to see ads for clothing – these would totally miss the mark in this setting – my mindset is not on meal delivery and it’s certainly not on clothes when I’m shopping at a grocery store.

After figuring out what customers want, when, and where, it’s important to stay in touch with customers – check in to see how the product is doing and how they want to receive information. This will help continue to be a vendor to that customer. As the customer base grows so does information about your audience – this is when it’s hugely important to get a good CRM in place (examples are Salesforce or Sugar). These tools help track what you’ve done with customers or prospects so you can “ping” (or reach out to) them again.

Marketers need to know what’s going on in the minds of the prospect and customers, but they also need to know what’s going on in the external environment – environment will effect peoples’ buying behaviors and need to effect marketing planning.