Guide to effective advertising and marketing

Good marketing and advertising takes effort, know how, financing and research. These ingredients are as essential as flour, yeast, water and heat are in making bread. To think you can get by with one or two of these ingredients is fooling yourself as the market is competitive and to compete positioning is essential. This doesn't mean the ingredients have to be huge, just there. Small marketing can be as effective on a smaller scale if its done right. Below are a few tips on getting started, maintaining momentum and keeping existing clients.

• Be Pro-Active in engaging current and future clients

• Know your market inside and out and around

• Have a product or service worth buying

• Involve your company in the community

These are just a few of the more intuitive approaches to marketing and advertising. There are also marketing principles, marketing theory and marketing analysis. While these are all useful and fall into the 'know how' category they aren't stand alone methods. A few of these principles are the following:

• The 4 P's of marketing (Place, product, price and promotion)

• Brand Equity

• Customer Life Time Value

• Target marketing and Niche marketing

• Primary and Secondary Research techniques

• Persuasion

Marketing and advertising is thus a multi-dimensional field that changes as people and people's needs change. Add to that a highly competitive environment in which other companies try to out think, out sell, out produce and out expose one another. Staying competitive involves continuous effort and devotion to the marketing and advertising effort. Staying competitive is another dimension of Marketing and Advertising that takes ability and capacity. Specifically it is good to keep abreast of a few important factors in addition to following the techniques listed above. The most important of these is innovation.

Innovation

Innovation is what keeps a company alive, it brings new life to the corporate world, new revenue, and new ways to grow. Think Apple, Toyota, Grameen Bank, Boeing and many other companies that's future has depended on innovating existing products by making them better or more differentiated in some way.

Financial management and corporate communication

Effective corporations communicate needs and problems between departments and work together to solve problems. Shying away from difficulties and/or brushing them under the carpet so to speak doesn't solve problems it allows them to fester and grow. The Japanese call this approach Kaizen and it works to improve morale, efficiency and productivity. Team work is at the core of this method and that doesn't mean selling your soul to a company it means actually working for a company rather than a paycheck. After all, if you're at work, why not work in a pleasant atmosphere that benefits and faces problems rather than avoids them?

Additionally, since a corporation is at in a major way a financial vehicle with financial motives, these motives should not be ignored. Working within a budget is fair so long as it allows the above methods and principles to be followed. This can involve some pretty tough negotiating and possibly some heavily weighted consultants. However, with team work consultants aren't always needed and the money spent on them can go to more advertising.

Advertising and Marketing well is an art and a corporate lifestyle. It is different from other divisions of Business because it is in many ways the face of the company and the truer this image is to the actual business the more possible it is clients are likely to see a company as genuine. This is so as advertising that doesn't reflect actual corporate operations can be perceived as phony and can turn some clients off a product or service for life.

Customer service

Good Marketing and Advertising also involves strong customer service. While this is not the field of Marketing and Advertising it is very much related and relevant to the process as customer service agents are often the first communication a client as and you know what they say about first impressions. The same may hold true to second, third and fourth impressions. In other words, keeping clients happy if something goes wrong, knowing what makes them happy and developing new ways to make clients happy without being totally unreasonable to corporate objectives is key to steady revenue, and customer loyalty.

All this said, the real challenge of Advertising and Marketing is actually doing it. Many things are easier said and done, but not impossible. Starting small is always the first step in learning how to walk in the World of advertising and marketing.

Sources:

1. http://www.helium.com/tm/535927/there-types-styles-marketing
2. http://www.helium.com/tm/533690/niche-marketing-different-arguably
3. http://www.valuebasedmanagement.net/methods_kaizen.html