PAI - Eco-savvy marketing

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Eco-savvy marketing

Destroy the streams and the salmon die. In a flourishing ecosystem the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

Just as ecosystems thrive on integration and synergy, your advertising and marketing communication coevolve into tributaries of influence that nourish sales: Boost their vitality overall and sales soar.

Here are a few questions that eco-savvy planning helps you address:

How and when do prospects form the knowledge of your company, services, and products, and develop the confidence they need, to select your offerings over the competition?
What keeps prospects from learning about your products, forming favorable impressions, and choosing your offerings over the competition?
How are competitors exploiting holes in your marketing communication strategy?
Relative to your sales goals, what is the role of each element of your marketing program, e.g., publicity and advertising, direct mail, sales collateral, telephone and face-to-face contact?
How does each element of your marketing program reinforce the whole; how does the whole strengthen the parts?
How can you improve the delivery, content, and timing of your messages to strengthen the web of influence in your market?
How can interactive media contribute to better overall performance?
How can you do more with less; in short, render fat into profit?

Here are a few ideas to help you develop more eco-savvy strategies:

Just as diversity strengthens ecosystems, multiexposure, multichannel communication is likely to yield higher return on investment than low frequency programs based on a single vehicle or channel - a one-size-fits-all catalog or print brochure, say.

It pays to diversify your messages and channels for several reasons: You may need to say different things to different people; you may need to say different things to the same people at different times, or the same thing in different ways; or you may wish to stimulate a band-wagon effect by sending the same message repeatedly and frequently through multiple channels.

The trick is to design a mix that delivers greatest return for your time and money. Here's a way to do it:

First, list in priority the different groups you need to reach and influence. This could include any combination drawn from various broad constituencies:

Market segments differentiated by the nature of their demand and need for your products and services
Demographically diverse segments of your market
Key participants in your sales and distribution chain, e.g., independent reps, say, or stocking distributors
Influentials, e.g., trade and consumer media, analysts and reviewers, investors, regulators, and competitors.

The second step is to list the channels through which you can reasonably reach and influence each group. e.g., trade and consumer media, trade shows, direct mail, telemarketing, face-to-face sales calls, the World Wide Web.

Now put up a spread sheet with each constituency down the rows and channels across the columns. Each cell identifies a potential "niche" to be exploited or defended; an initiative to consider or review, e.g., direct mail to computer designers. Many will be irrelevant to your purposes, e.g., trade show presentation to stockholders. Cross them out. Here are things to note as you review the cells remaining:

For each constituency you need at least one effective channel
Several channels may be appropriate for a given constituency
A given channel may reach more than one group
Some channels are considerably more expensive to exploit than others.

This grid effectively frames your opportunities and priorities; establishes a way to rationally allocate budget and effort. The higher the row in your spreadsheet, the more important the constituency. The higher the priority of the niche, the more share of budget, the more emphasis and creative thinking, it deserves.

Your goal is to exploit the open niches through a marketing communication strategy that makes most efficient use of your resources and achieves the most effective results.

Consider for a moment the changes you're trying to achieve within each constituency, e.g., create awareness, focus perceived needs, arouse interest, educate, motivate to action.

Similarly, consider the information you'd like to gather from each constituency to help improve sales and the quality of your relationships, e.g., levels of awareness, perceived problems and needs, opinions and attitudes, buying behavior.

For each constituency, define your program goals, e.g., greater product awareness, increased flow of qualified leads, sharper product differentiation.

Now, assuming that your resources are finite, for each constituency, assign priorities to each niche. You're seeking the most effective use of each channel to achieve the changes you're looking for and to tap the information you need. Consider several things:

How are you using each channel now; how effectively are you exploiting each niche?
How are your competitors using each channel, exploiting each niche?
What are the strengths and weaknesses of each channel relative to your needs at each stage of the sales cycle? How effectively are you exploiting the strengths of each channel, covering weaknesses?
Where are the "sticking points" in your sales cycle, e.g., the marketing communication hurdles that stretch out the sales cycle or increase sales costs?
What elements (channels, messages or collateral media) do you need to add or replace to achieve better results?
How can you build more efficient "feedback loops" into your program to gather more pertinent information about your constituencies and to better measure results?
How can you assure that your messages and collateral media "cooperate" rather than "compete" across channels and niches?

Outline your strategy as follows:

For each constituency, list the specific sequence of messages you must convey to move understanding, attitudes, and motivation from where they are now to where they need to be to achieve your goals. Summarize each message.
Assign each message to the most appropriate or cost-effective channel. This involves fleshing out each niche in your grid with brief summaries of the messages you wish to convey.
Within each channel you may have options with regard to how you disseminate your message, e.g., choice of outlet, location or placement, release dates, frequency. For each message in each channel select the most appropriate dissemination options.
Each channel offers a variety of "formats," or ways of packaging different types of information, e.g., print media offers fact sheets, brochures, catalogs, newsletters, etc. Select the most appropriate format for each message.
Identify a brief core message or theme to weave in through every niche to unify your program.
For each niche, specifically identify a "feedback" loop through which you can monitor the progress and results of your efforts.
Develop a budget for each initiative, e.g., each series of messages disseminated via a given channel. If you need to trim your budget, trim first from the lowest priority niches.
Develop a time table for action.

Yes, your eco-plan took a lot of time, thought, and effort. But now you know what you need to do to achieve better results in your market, as well as when, why, and how you'll assess progress, and how much your strategy will cost. The feedback loops provide the data you need to monitor progress, detect changing conditions, and tweak your plan to achieve more sales, faster, with less cost.

P. T. Barnum once said, "I know that half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. I just don't know which half." Clearly he lacked eco-savvy.

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