The advertiser also has to study about the demographics involved to achieve the marketing objectives of the business. The agency knows the variety of media options available for advertising such as TV, newspapers, magazines, radio, and internet. The aim of an agency is to achieve the business goals within the marketing budget of the client regardless of the options used.

In-depth knowledge

The agency must have in-depth knowledge and experience to achieve versatility across various media. Media buying agencies are facing several challenges in this modern world as they should understand the changing needs of the customers. Marketing resources and budgets used should adapt the needs of the customers. Hence, the media buyers should be able to get the media resources acccording to the market conditions.

More Exposure

A professional agency not only buys the required media for advertising your business but also evaluate the reach of the media against the business goals. The integrated approach of the agency helps your business to convert the responses to the advertisement into sales. Thus, the company can gain more exposure in the market through the advertisement delivered through different media.

No Extra Costs

If you’re hiring media buying services from an agency, then you’ll get expert help without spending additional money. A professional agency always has a tie-up with most of the media; the agency will receive great discounts. Hence, hiring an agency is more practical than buying a media space for advertising your business. The agencies specialized in media buying know how to negotiate for good time slots and price than the advertiser. Because of the extensive experience possessed by them, they know how to handle different problems that may arise in between 

More time for your busines 

All the sales representatives of the media will contact only the agency. This enables you to have time to spend on more important tasks of your business. As a business owner, you will not be the person discussing over the phone regarding the deals and offers made by different media. You won’t be stuck with your accounting and billing tasks that require more time to solve. A media buying agency usually appoints accounting employees to ensure that the budgets are not mismatching. The business owner can save a great amount of time by escaping from all these hassles as agency streamlines the tasks in a systematic manner.

Tracking the results

The agency takes care of all the ratings achieved through the advertisement. They’ll make sure that you’re getting the expected outcome for the budget. The agency will plan and design a marketing strategy so that the advertisement reaches the targeted customers to achieve the targeted marketing goals. Media buying services help to increase brand credibility, customer base, purchasing leads, and business exposure. 

Source by Nandini Pathak

Global marketing The Oxford University Press defines global marketing as “marketing on a worldwide scale reconciling or taking commercial advantage of global operational differences, similarities and opportunities in order to meet global objectives.”

Global marketing Advantages and Disadvantages

Advantages

• Economies of scale in production and distribution
• Lower marketing costs
• Power and scope
• Consistency in brand image
• Ability to leverage good ideas quickly and efficiently
• Uniformity of marketing practices
• Helps to establish relationships outside of the “political arena”
• Helps to encourage ancillary industries to be set up to cater for

The needs of the global player

The benefits of marketing over traditional marketing

Reach

The nature of the internet means businesses now have a truly global reach. While traditional media costs limit this kind of reach to huge multinationals, marketing opens up new avenues for smaller businesses, on a much smaller budget, to access potential consumers from all over the world.

Scope

Internet marketing allows the marketer to reach consumers in a wide range of ways and enables them to offer a wide range of products and services. E-.Marketing includes, among other things, information management, public relations, customer service and sales. With the range of new technologies becoming available all the time, this scope can only grow.

Interactivity

Whereas traditional marketing is largely about getting a brand’s message out there- marketing facilitates conversations between companies and consumers. With a two way communication channel, companies can feed off of the responses of their consumers, making them more dynamic and adaptive.

Immediacy

Internet marketing is able to, in ways never before imagined, provide an immediate impact. Imagine you’re reading your favorite magazine. You see a double-page advert for some new product or service, maybe BMW’s latest luxury sedan or Apple’s latest I Pod offering. With this kind of traditional media, it’s not that easy for you, the consumer, to take the step from hearing about a product to actual acquisition. With e-Marketing, it’s easy to make that step as simple as possible, meaning that within a few short clicks you could have booked a test drive or ordered the Pod. And all of this can happen regardless of normal office hours. Effectively, Internet marketing makes business hours 24 hours per day, 7 days per week for every week of the year. By closing the gap between providing information and eliciting a consumer reaction, the consumer’s buying cycle is speeded up and advertising spend can go much further in creating immediate leads.

Demographics and targeting

Generally speaking, the demographics of the Internet are a marketer’s dream. Internet users, considered as a group, have greater buying power and could perhaps be considered as a population group skewed towards the middle-classes. Buying power is not all though. The nature of the Internet is such that its users will tend to organize themselves into far more focused groupings. Savvy marketers who know where to look can quite easily find access to the niche markets they wish to target. Marketing messages are most effective when they are presented directly to the audience most likely to be interested. The Internet creates the perfect environment for niche marketing to targeted groups.

Adaptively and closed loop marketing

Closed Loop Marketing requires the constant measurement and analysis of the results of marketing initiatives. By continuously tracking the response and effectiveness of a campaign, the marketer can be far more dynamic in adapting to consumers’ wants and needs. With e marketing, responses can be analyzed in real-time and campaigns can be tweaked continuously. Combined with the immediacy of the Internet as a medium, this means that there’s minimal advertising spend wasted on less than effective campaigns. Maximum marketing efficiency from  Marketing creates new opportunities to seize strategic competitive advantages. The combination of all these factors results in an improved ROI and ultimately, more customers, happier customers and an improved bottom line.

Disadvantages

• Differences in consumer needs wants and usage patterns for products
• Differences in consumer response to  marketing mix elements
• Differences in brand and product development and the competitive environment
• Differences in the legal environment, some of which may conflict with those of

The home market

• Differences in the institutions available, some of which may call for the creation

of entirely new ones (e.g. infrastructure)

• Differences in administrative procedures
• Differences in product placement.

Source by yuvapavi

Marketing Retainer

If you are a company without a Marketing Department or indeed an appointed Marketing employee but you still need to market your company there is an alternative to signing up another individual to work in your company.  In these times of “crisis” and cut backs you may not want to or have room in your budget for another full time worker.  You may not be able to afford to pay another salary, more social security – you may not have room in your budget for illness or holiday but you still want and need to get your marketing done.

 Marketing companies will often work with you on a retainer basis which means instead of employing the company on a one off basis you work with them on a continuous basis, sometimes for a matter of months or years.   In effect they become your marketing department, researching your business and working out the best way to market you or your product.

 The benefits of this are of course firstly the obvious – financial.  Generally you will pay less for a marketing retainer than a full time member of staff.  Plus there are no holidays to pay for, no illness to cover, no social security to pay.  But a marketing company may also be more focussed on really marketing your product after all it is their job.  They won’t be distracted by office gossip or who’s covering reception at lunchtime, they are 100% focused on getting you results.

As far as knowing your business they will research your business and your target market which means they will come at it from a fresh perspective and see it from your potential client’s point of view – something you may find hard to do from inside the company.

You can work with them on a month to month basis – though of course as with everything the longer you work with a company the more chance you give them and yourself to really market your product or business and of course the more months you sign up to, the less you pay.  True marketing rarely happens overnight or from one advert or piece of PR.  To really build your brand you need continuous, consistent marketing that will build the foundation of your progress.  But you can let them go whenever you want which you just can’t do with an employee. 

 The marketing company should be dedicated to you, coming in for meetings, coordinating your marketing plan and schedule and become part of your team.  In these times of cutting back it’s a very good way of making sure you are committed to your marketing without having to pay another employee.

Source by Redline Company

Importance of Marketing

From a very small fish to becoming the big one and then the biggest among all. This is how few brands have changed with time e-g: Levis Microsoft and many other “The Big Fish”

The financial success of such brands have been depending on combined efforts of their financial strategies and their marketing efforts. One thing that’s been common among all there brands is a high degree of Brand loyalty. They have managed to capture the share of heart and in turn share of customer’s wallet.

Companies now understand that marketing plays an important roll in their overall success ,so now companies have CMOs (Chief Marketing Officer) along with CFOs and CEOs. They understand that if there are functions close to customers its ether Sales or Marketing. Sales become a direct interface among customs and products offered by companies, and marketing is an indirect function between customer and the company.

But what makes marketing so big? Why is it important? If you have a great product you are bound to succeed then why do u need to spend on marketing / advertising?

The answer to these questions lies deep within the customer’s brain. Customers / consumers are smart and they understand what makes your product different form mine. If you are offering then 1 % more that what I do why should they pay me rather than paying you. That’s the point. And secondly it’s important to communicate the product offerings to the end user. If a marketing team has worked hard on understanding the consumer needs they need to make sure their customers get a feel “This brand knows what I want “. Trust me this is the only major differentiator between why your 1% more is able to get you more loyal and more number of customers.

The time has changed. To products that are offered by a brand you have “n” number of more  substitutes and consumers get to know which is the better substitute that suites there requirements . So it is important to make sure that marketing efforts are more on understanding the changing needs on today’s customer. We need to understand the minds of customers. It’s rightly said “customer is KING”

Marketing managers need to understand the customer needs and they need to make their major decisions such as the features to include, the price to be offered to customers and what to spend on advertisements.

Marketing today has become a emotional research which helps understanding customer and consumers psychology so that products are developed based on these understanding. The marketing managers need to answer following questions:

• How do we find the right market segment?
• How do we differentiate?
• How can we compete with low cost business models?
• How do we build a better brand?
• How do we reduce cost of customer acquisition?

A successful Marketing team can carefully analyze customer needs and carefully monitor there competitors marketing moves. Remember a short term sales driven view does not work in business world today. The C-level managers, the CEO,CFO should communicate importance of marketing in an organization,  how the marketing function plays a great role in organizations success.

Source by drypen

Most managers & marketing writers now distinguish between selling & marketing. The “selling concept” assumes that resisting consumer have to be persuaded by vigorous hard-selling techniques to buy non-essential goods or services. Products are sold rather then bought. The “marketing concept”, on the contrary, assumes that the producer’s task is to find wants & fill them. In other words, you don’t sell what you make, you make what will be bought. As well as satisfying existing needs, marketers can also anticipate 7 create new ones. The markets fro Walkman, video games, personal computers, & genetic engineering, to choose some recent examples, were largely created rather than identified.

Marketers are consequently always looking for market opportunities – profitable possibilities of filling unsatisfied needs or creating new ones in areas in which the company is likely to enjoy a differential advantage, due to its distinctive competencies (the things it does particularly well). Market opportunities are generally isolated by market segmentations. Once a target market has been identified, a company has to decide what goods or services to offer. This means that much of the work of marketing has been done before the final product or service come into existence. It also means that the marketing concept has to be understood throughout the company, e. g. in the production department of a manufacturing company as much as in the marketing department itself. The company must also take account of the existence of competitors, who always have to be identified, monitored & defeated in the search for loyal customers.

Rather than risk launching a product or service solely on the basis of intuition or guesswork, most companies undertake market research. They collect & analyze information about the size of a potential market, about consumers’ reactions to particular product or service features, & so on. Sales representatives, who also talk to customers, are another important source of information.

Once the basic offer, e. g. a product concept, has been established, the company has to think about the marketing mix, i. e. all the various elements of the marketing programme, their integration, & the amount of effort that the company can expend on them in order to influence the target market. The best-known classification of these elements is the “4 Ps”: product, place, promotion, & price. Aspects to be concerned in marketing products include quality, features (standards & optional), style, brand name, size, packaging, services & guarantee. Place in a marketing mix includes such factors as distributions channels, locations of points of sale, transport, inventory size, etc. Promotion groups together advertising, publicity, sales promotion, & personal selling, while price includes the basic list price, discounts, the length of payment period, possible credit terms, & so on. It’s a job of a product manager or a brand manager to look for ways to increase sales by changing the marketing mix.

It must be remembered that quite apart from consumer markets (in which people buy products for direct consumption) there exists an enormous producer or industrial or business market, consisting of all the individuals & organizations that acquire goods & services that are used in the production of other goods, on in the supply of services to others. Few consumers realize that the producer market is actually larger than consumer market, since it contains all the raw materials, manufactured parts & components that go into consumer goods, plus capital equipment such as buildings & machines, supplies such as energy & pens & papers, & services ranging from cleaning to management consulting, all of which have to be marketed. There is consequently more industrial that consumer marketing, even though ordinary consumer are seldom exposed to it.

Marketing is a new science. What has been around previously is the art of salesmanship. Salesmanship is the art of manufacturing something & making another person to want it. Marketing is the art of finding out what the other person wants, then manufacturing it for him.

In a market of multiple choice, it is no longer sufficient to produce a product 7 show your customers that it satisfies one of their basic needs. You must show them it provides benefits other products fail to provide, that it can be supplied at a competitive price & above all, supplied reliability. But in this fast-changing world, competitors catch up more quickly then ever.

Preferences that consumer have for this or that product work for shorter & shorter periods. Choice makes marketing work.

Companies need to be constantly engaged in product development, if they wish to grow & make profits.

Research is the basic tool of marketing. A marketer must determine what customers needs are. Marketing experts have developed techniques for determining the needs of prospective customers. It’s done by way of market segmentation.

How can market segmentation be of help to a manager who wants to develop a new product? Every market can be divided into segments or, in other words, into separate groups of consumers. First there are demographic factors like age, income, educational background, occupation, size of family, type of home & neighborhood, etc. Then there are psychographic factors – the customers’ opinions & interests, hobbies, vacations spots, favorite sports etc.

Then a product is compared with the goods already established in the market by quality or quantity standards. To be a success you must be ahead of your competitors.

Competition never stops. That is why market segmentation must never stop as well. It should be on a permanent basis. Introduction of a pioneer product cam immediately change the composition & number of a consumer grouping.

For nearly 150 years – up until the 1930s – Americans experienced a tremendous era of production. Automobiles, appliances, & wide variety of consumer goods were manufactured without a thought to what the consumer might actually want. The population was increasing dramatically & demand was high for all types of quality products. Industrialists thus perceived no need for products that were oriented toward consumer preferences. In the 1930s everything changed. The economy was rocked by a severe depression, & suddenly people could no longer afford many of the products that were being produced. To regain these lost sales & to find potential new markets, companies like General Motors & General Electric pioneered the marketing concept & launched America into an era of marketing. The American Association defines marketing as the “performance of business activities that direct the flow of goods & services from the producer to the consumer or user.” While modern marketing approaches first made an appearance in the 1920s & 1930s, it was not until the 1950s that the more sophisticated aspects like the marketing concept had fully evolved. Today marketing is easily as important as production.

The marketing concept implies that the decision-making process in production should begin with the customer. Modern businesses believe that profits can be maximized by creating products for which there is known demand. Thus, companies today are constantly looking for creative ideas that will meet specific consumer needs & wants.

Of course, nonprofit businesses such as charities, hospitals, universities, & museums can also use the marketing concept to advantage.

The marketing concept directly influences the functions of marketing. All marketing planning, or establishment of objectives & the steps necessary to achieve them, must consider how the marketing concept will affect these major specialized activities. There are seven functions of marketing:

1. Buying. Purchasing raw materials, products, &/or services for business, government, or consumer uses.
2. Selling. Finding prospective buyers, promoting goods &services through personal selling, advertising, sales promotion, & publicity, & providing post-purchase service.
3. Marketing research. Systematically gathering, recording, & analyzing data about problems related to the marketing of goods & services.
4. Transportation & storage. Providing vehicles such as rail or truck to get goods from the producer to the consumer, & storing these goods until the final sale if necessary.
5. Risk-taking. Using market research to avoid possible product or business failures, & shifting risk to insurance in cases such as fire, theft, & flood.
6. Finance & credit. Borrowing or obtaining necessary credit to fund operations.
7. Standardization & grading. Providing specifications so that the quantity & quality of goods can be controlled & compared.

Source by Michael Newman