Spice Up Your Marketing

We often have clients come up to us wanting to do some marketing on their business/brand online. Most of them will come up with straight discounts of their product or service but most of them lacks creativity in their campaigns and we ended up becoming their brand evangelists after a while.

Points I keep in mind when planning for campaigns:

• Be very creative – Throwing discounts off the shelves usually is a hit and miss. Take a stroll down any shopping mall and you will be greeted with sales and discounts in almost every shop, it’s downright boring and if it is not believable anymore, buyers don’t buy it. The concept is the same with online surfers. The are a myriad of ways to attract buyers to a brand: re-launch an old product as new vintage, give out free samples, 1 for 1 coupons, mini contests and giveaways, etc. The idea is to be creative. If you don’t find it believable yourself, nobody will.
• Terms & Conditions – We were recently approached to promote a website with a product that has over 20 lines, half a webpage worth of terms and conditions. Perfect recipe for failure, I wouldn’t even read the the first line of the T&C after looking at it! If you are that paranoid with your users abusing your campaign, don’t do it.
• Keep it simple – Nobody likes a complicated campaign. Start a contest, participant must buy your product, tell 10 friends about it, ask them to buy it, then take photos and then post it to your website OR start a contest, give a free sample and ask participants to post a comment on your website after using it. I’m exaggerating but you get the idea, fight the hassle.
• Use different channels – Don’t start a campaign without planning which channels to publicize it. Imagine running a promotion on your website hoping someone will spot it. The impact is minimal, go big with social media and websites with huge traffic. Don’t be afraid to try and once you know which channels are effective, work with them closely on future campaigns.
• Don’t be cheap – Don’t overspend either, work with the right channels and reward them well if the campaign goes your way. If you try to squeeze them dry, don’t blame anyone if your campaign doesn’t get the deserved attention. Bandwidth ain’t cheap, and we know that best.

Once you get your campaign plans into action, it helps people like us understand them better to execute it cost effectively. Well, throwing us a million dollar budget works too.