Ah, but did it work?

There’s one more question you really need to ask after distributing a coupon
or other sales promotion. This final question has little to do with the profit-
ability of the coupon program. The question is “Did the coupon achieve my
broader marketing objectives?” In other words, did your coupon do one or
more of the following:
Attract new customers, some of whom will become regular buyers
Help ward off competition
Boost sales for the period
Introduce customers to a new or improved product or service
Support or enhance other advertising or sales initiatives
Help cushion a price increase
Help cross-sell another product to existing customers
Help motivate the sales force by giving them a new sales incentive or tool
Make your distributors, retailers, or other intermediaries happy and
more willing to push your product or service
Help you gain access to greater distribution
Help you migrate customers to direct or Web-based purchasing
Increase repeat purchase rates
Maintain or increase your market share
Attract frequent switchers — those customers who are always looking
for a deal
Attract a specific, attractive segment (or group) of customers with an
offer designed for and distributed to them
Make a profit
As this lengthy list demonstrates, many reasons exist for distributing cou-
pons or offering special deals. Sometimes marketers are willing to run a
coupon program at or below break-even costs in order to accomplish their
marketing objectives. The most important objective may not be to make a
profit; it may be to give your salespeople an incentive or tool for boosting

Deciding whether to adopt a new strategy or improve an old one

If you simply need to improve upon and continue using an already-successful
strategy, say that clearly in this section of your plan and shape the plan to
improve the efficiency of the marketing program you used last year. If, how-
ever, you really need to shop for a new and better strategic approach, then
say so now and realize that you first need to figure out what your effective
strategic plan is before you can expect to optimize any program based on it.
In other words, pick one of these basic orientations for your plan:
Efficiency-oriented:
Your plan should introduce a number of specific
improvements on how you market your product but should not alter
your basic strategy from last year.
Effectiveness-oriented:
Your plan needs to identify a major opportunity
or problem (of the customers’) and describe a strategy to respond to it.

Analyzing your management and control

Control is sometimes hard to achieve in marketing. Some businesses don’t
really know what’s going on in their marketing because so many marketing
activities can occur and customers can be so widespread and difficult to
track. For these reasons, many companies waste time and money on their
marketing and don’t even realize it.
Writing everything down
One of the first things you should do to control your marketing is document
and record every action and expense. Keep good records and make careful lists.
This concept may sound obvious, but keeping track of your marketing can be
difficult to do. For example, my firm sells training materials and publications
to companies directly for use in their training programs. We track our direct
contacts with clients and know who buys and uses what. Or do we? We also
work with multiple distributors and publishers who may sell our publications
to companies, sometimes without our knowledge. And to make the situation
more complicated, we also sell publications to consultants who then sell
trainings based on our publications to companies. So a company can pur-
chase one of our products in many ways.

Prices

To marketers, price is not only the list price or sticker price of a product, but
it’s also any adjustments to that price, such as discounts and other price-ori-
ented inducements to buy, including coupons, frequency rewards, quantity
discounts, and free samples. Any such offers adjust the price the customer
pays, with the goal of boosting sales.
Price-based inducements to buy are generally termed
sales promotions
by
marketers, just to confuse the issue hopelessly. As I delve further into this
subject in Chapter 8, you’ll also find out how to use price-based promotions
to boost your sales and attract new customers.

Product

To marketers,product is what you sell, whether it’s a physical product or a
service, idea, or even another person (like in politics) or yourself (like when
you search for a new job). When you think about ways of changing your prod-
uct offering to boost sales, you can look at anything from new or upgraded
products to different packaging to added extras like services or warranties.
And you can also think about ways to improve the quality of your product.
After all, people want the best quality they can get, so any improvements in
quality usually translate into gains in sales as well.

Sales and Service Success

Sales and marketing: That’s what people usually say, separating these two
intertwined activities in an artificial way. I don’t really know where selling
stops and marketing begins. In every successful business I’ve seen, the two
activities work hand in glove to signal new customers to the door, serve cur-
rent customers, and thank past customers for their business in such a way
that they feel good about coming back again. So this part on how to do great
sales is an important complement to the other parts of the book. Use it to
make sure that you’re finding and closing as many good leads as you possi-
bly can. Or use it to diagnose or improve any sales process, because there’s
often room for improved performance

Honing Your Marketing Skills

Some important skills are involved in doing good marketing. For example,
you need to do market research to find out what customers want and how
to sell better than your competitors do. And communicating well is obvi-
ously important in marketing, so I cover writing in this part as well. The star
of this section is that secret ingredient that transforms ordinary marketing
into the stuff of brilliant breakthroughs: creativity. I include a chapter that
shares many of the techniques and tools from my firm’s corporate creativity
workshops to help you make sure that you get that special leverage that only
creativity can provide.

Power Alternatives to Advertising

Advertising is costly. In this part, I show you how to get your message across
and generate leads and sales in creative ways that cost less than traditional
advertising. Sometimes something as simple as a really well-designed busi-
ness card is the secret to winning business and boosting sales. Newsletters,
publicity, catalogs, logos and letterhead, and other marketing elements may
also boost your sales. Check out this part if you want to save money on
expensive advertising or just to make sure that you’re doing these essentials
as well as you can.

Advertising Management and Design

Ads are often the key element of a marketing program, and in this part, I
share insights, how-to tips, and tools to help you design winning ads for your
campaign. Advertising needs to start with a good plan and affordable budget,
which I cover in Chapter 4. Then you have to actually design hard-hitting
ads that draw attention to your message and produce leads and sales

Tools for Designing Great Marketing Programs

Things go better when you have a plan in mind. In marketing, this plan can
be as simple as a back-of-the-envelope program using the Five Ps (product,
pricing, placement, promotions, and people), which I cover in Chapter 1. Or
it can be as complex as a detailed, systematic audit of all marketing activities,
followed by a carefully written plan and a spreadsheet-based budget to go
with it. I cover all these options in Part I, and I include the templates needed
to take the sting out of designing a good program that boosts sales and prof-
its. In fact, this book’s planning templates are easier to use and more profes-
sional than any of the software programs I have evaluated