I was sitting at a traffic light this morning when I saw a rather interesting yard sign along the road. It was advertising cremation services. I had to laugh, not because I have a morbid sense of humor, but because I don’t know anyone who would call to arrange for a cremation as they sat at a traffic light. The sign seemed a very odd way to try to market the business.

The point of marketing is to engage a consumer so that they eventually make a purchase from you. We use all kinds of tactics to make that happen. You may engage customers with a brochure. You may drive them towards a sale by attending a trade show. You may have a video touting the benefits of your products or get customers interested in making a purchase by hosting a golf outing. Marketing is a very big umbrella. Regardless of what your marketing efforts are, how do you know when you are engaging a potential customer and when you are not? I like to use what I call the three-bucket approach to marketing. There are three general questions that the consumer has to have answered before they will become your customer. Each of them has marketing strategies that are attached to each. Each of these concepts builds upon the other. Bucket one leads to bucket two, and bucket two leads to bucket three.

Question #1: Who are you and what do you produce?

A consumer will not buy from you until they clearly know who you are and what you are selling. The first bucket is Awareness Marketing. There should be a strong component of all your marketing efforts that reinforce who you are – namely branding your company and your products or services. This is the first point of every web site, social media for business, signage, traditional media and the like. Most TV ads are awareness marketing. If I am watching an advertisement for Head and Shoulders shampoo, the point of the ad is not to make me drop what I am doing to go and purchase shampoo. The point is that I am aware of the product and will remember it when I encounter it in a retail aisle.

Effective awareness marketing uses repetition to drive home the point. That is why you need a strong brand to help you communicate who you are and you need to get it in front of your target market in a number of ways. Let’s say you are sponsoring an event where a lot of potential clients will be located. You need to get your logo within their site lines and on some sort of take away item. You need them to not only visually see your logo, they need to hear the name of your company spoken. The worst thing that can happen with awareness marketing is the consumer walks away from the experience without a clue of who you are. All of your awareness marketing has to be geared to making the consumer understand who you are and what you produce whenever they see or hear the name of your company. If you are ineffective with the first bucket, you will fail trying to make the second bucket work.

Question #2: Do I need what you are selling?

Next is the First Time Sales bucket. This is where marketing is used to convince a person to try your products and services. Retail has used several effective first time sales strategies over the years, such as free trial samples, discount coupons, introductory pricing, point-of-purchase product sampling (particularly effective in grocery stores and fast-food restaurants). If you are not in retail sales marketing, you may take a very different tactic to gain a first time customer. If you attend trade shows, demonstrations are common first time sales marketing strategies. Allowing a customer to experience your product or service – to kick the tires, so to speak – is a good way to get past any doubts they may have had. Engaging the five senses is very important to first time sales. If someone can touch, taste, hear, see and smell the product (depending upon what you are selling), all the better. We gear first time sales marketing to get the consumer to try it.

Another aspect of first time sales marketing has to do with the price-to-quality ratio. When you are building a marketing campaign around first time sales, you have to be convincing that your product is worth the price. The phrases you use in your marketing campaigns should reinforce all of this. For instance, here are two automobile manufacturer’s tag lines that are taking very different approaches to price-to-quality in their advertising. Do you know which companies use these phrases in their sales literature?

The Ultimate Driving Machine.

MPG savvy and tech smart.

The first phrase is from BMW. They use it to convince people that it doesn’t get any better than driving a "Beemer” – it is worth the high price tag. The second phrase is from Ford. They are appealing to a cost-conscience and eco-friendly market – particularly a younger audience who value high tech ability in a low cost vehicle.

Question #3: Are you worthy of my business again?

The third bucket is Retention Marketing. It has been said that it is much easier to keep your current customers than to gain new ones. This is where marketing branches out into customer service and the measurement of the first time sales experience. Customer surveys are one way to do this. Another is to pay attention to customer complaints, especially if you are using social media. Do you have a strategy for fixing problems quickly? Your follow up with a new customer will make a big difference in retaining them.

Always try to do something beyond the initial sale in retention marketing. Customer appreciation events are great. So is treating them to some entertainment event. But never mistake handing out goodies with total customer satisfaction. The most effective retention marketing is fixing any problems the customer had with you in their first go around. The biggest impact you will have in retention marketing is to listen very carefully to your customer and act on what they say.

Effective marketing gives attention to all three of these marketing questions with what is put into the three buckets. You can build a total marketing strategy around these three general questions. It helps you to categorize your marketing efforts and it helps you to measure your effectiveness. Otherwise there is a tendency to try any new marketing idea that comes down the pike without any thought of what you are really trying to accomplish. Who knows, it may even keep you from putting an ineffective lawn sign at a traffic signal trying to make a sale.

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Photo by Svetl