The Beauty Of No Budget: Marketing Campaigns

This post originally appeared on the @RepKnight Blog (www.blog.repknight.com). RepKnight is a reputation management solution monitoring the web and social networks 24/7.

Limitations in marketing are good. They force teams to be more creative, lean and resourceful.

When you’re faced with limitations-a shrinking budget, a tight deadline-you can’t just reach for the phone and place an ad with the local newspaper. You’ve got to think twice as hard about questions you normally answer on auto-pilot: How do I give my clients the best ROI for their social media campaign? How do we get people talking about this product?

Limitations are beautiful. They force creativity. When I charge clients for projects, I tend to charge less than my competitors. This is because I know we can do more with less.

It’s easy to think you need alot of money to market your service or product. Unless you’re determined to run glossy magazine ads and TV commercials, you don’t. Not having a big budget means you have twice the brain power to devote to the project because you have to think twice as hard about how to make it work.

There’s a company called 37 Signals. They make web apps like Basecamp (project management) and Highrise (CRM). And they embrace constraints. They pride themselves on the simplicity and basic functionality of their products. They realize that there are so many features you just don’t need so they keep hacking away fat from their products.

Same goes for marketing campaigns. If we all did alot with little, we’d be better marketers.

Dummy-Runs: Housekeeping Rules for PR Campaigns

I regularly do mass PR campaigns for clients. This means driving traffic in the double digits to their brand. But there's a huge amount of groundwork to be done before we even issue a press release to the local rag.

The one problem I commonly see with clients brands are simple mistakes, from spelling errors on their website to inconsistent messaging across their web and print collateral and broken "Contact Us" forms. Why is this a problem?

If you're driving mass numbers of potential customers to your website, what will their impression of your company be when they see all these errors? You include 24/7 support in the product cost but you can't even fix the technical issues on your own website?

Think back to your school days. If you got a date with the best looking guy/girl in your year, you'd want to make a good first impression because there's dozens of other girls/guys after him/her. Sames goes for customers. If the company is going to be hit by mass exposure, it needs to leave a good impression on the market. Bad impressions are hard to reverse.

Before I press launch on client PR campaigns, I suggest to clients that they round up 40-50 of their friends/acquaintances/well-wishers and ask them to hit their website, product, Facebook and Twitter profiles simultaneously. What do they notice? What buttons aren't working? This exercise is a dummy run. It's purpose is to expose flaws in your product before a mass market finds them via hype and word of mouth. Their expectations will be significantly higher than your friends and family so it's an important test. What's more, it'll give your team a taste of dealing with support issues while under pressure.

It's very easy to forget the bread and butter processes that make your business work, like an auto-response confirmation email sent to customers when they sign-up or even a "Contact Us" option (I have seen online businesses that forgot to include this on their website when it was customers only means of making an order!). In the excitement of building a new product or adding new features, priorities get lost. As long as they're dealt with before a PR spike, that's okay. If they are not, you're paying your PR company to kill you with bad publicity.

 

TechFluff & Co specialize in PR and marketing campaigns for media and technology companies and startups. Need more sales? Want to increase downloads of your app? Generate regular media coverage of your product? Email Lyra McKee at lyra@techfluff.co.

Ending The Myth: Why We Can't Market Bad Products

By @LyraMcKee

There is a misconception among startups and corporate companies, particularly those in technology, about marketing. They think marketing can sell bad products.

Usually, the conversation goes something like this:

"Executive/Entrepreneur: We want you to blast the news about our product to the world. We want everyone everywhere to know who we are and what we're doing. And we want you to market it.

Me: What's the product?

Exec/Entrepreneur: It's a...*insert vague response*

Me: A what? What's that? What does it do?

Exec/Entrepreneur: It helps you *waffles on with another vague response*

Me: What problem does it solve?

Exec/Entrepreneur: * yet another vague response*

Me: Has anyone bought this yet?

Exec/Entrepreneur: No but if we assault the market with billboard campaigns, glossy magazine ads and TV commercials and just really stuff it in their face, they will.

Me: *sinking feeling..*

Any marketers recognise this scenario?

No amount of marketing can make a bad product sell. A good marketing plan can make an ok product (think FourSquare Vs Gowalla) successful but it cannot sell a bad product. It comes down to conversion. Marketing can drive traffic to the product. But for customers to sign-up or part with cash, the product itself has to solve the right problem. You cannot fool customers with sexy campaigns.

Sadly, we turn down alot of work because of this. We can't work with products we don't believe in. It makes us look bad and discredits our work. And it makes the company in question look worse because they can't live up to the hype we've created.

I hope this is the end of the myth.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

TechFluff & Co's New Blog

Hey folks!

How are you? We hope you're well. This is our new Posterous site which we'll be using to blog useful tips and info about marketing for companies in the technology and media industry. We'll still be using the Tumblr site to post interesting photos and quotes. We'll try to blog here every day and share all we know about marketing and PR.

Any questions? Tweet us at @TechFluffCo or follow us on Facebook: http://on.fb.me/oSgvls.>

Enjoy folks!

Team TechFluff.