Do you think of marketing ideas as marketing strategies or do you use marketing ideas to select the best marketing tactics for your marketing strategy?

I’ve been posting this week on the differences between marketing strategies, marketing tactics and marketing ideas. Today’s post deals with marketing ideas.

What Is A Marketing Idea?

Marketing ideas are specific ideas that you can use to implement your tactics. However, a marketing idea may be appropriate for many target markets and for many marketing strategies.

Only when you’re sure that a marketing idea will be effective with your target market and will help to reach your marketing strategy, should you use a marketing idea as a tactic within your marketing strategy.

For example, if you’re trying to bring traffic through the search engines, you need ideas for articles on and off your site and for getting back links back to your site.

If you are using the social networks for traffic, you need ideas for getting attention from members of the site. If you’re using Digg, you need an entertaining or controversial article with broad general appeal to get good traffic. Even what you put in your signature for forums is a marketing idea.

You’ll find many marketing ideas through e-books, special reports and marketing books for off line businesses. But all of these marketing ideas will not work for you because they either won’t work well with your target market or won’t advance your marketing strategy.

You must choose only marketing ideas that will be effective within your marketing strategy. The ones that you select then become your marketing tactics.

Marketing Strategy, Tactics and Ideas Conclusion

You need all three, and when you understand the differences and relationship between the three, you’ll gain better control of your marketing and waste fewer marketing resources.

You do this through good planning in the following order.

Determine your business goal.

Decide the marketing goal that best supports your business goal.

Create the best marketing strategy to meet your marketing goal.

Select several tactics that support your marketing strategy

from all the marketing ideas that you are exposed to.

So of the three, your marketing strategy is most important and marketing ideas are least important. If you just move from one marketing idea to another without a marketing strategy, you’ll waste your marketing resources without getting much return on your investment.

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Posted 7-31-08: How Do You Use Marketing Ideas?

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Understanding differences between a marketing strategy, marketing tactics and marketing ideas is important to your business and marketing success. This week I’m posting about these three aspects of marketing to clarify the role and importance of each.

Yesterday’s post defined and discussed the need for a marketing strategy. Today’s post covers marketing tactics.

Tomorrow’s post will cover marketing ideas. You can access it through the following link: Marketing Ideas

What Is A Marketing Tactic?

Marketing tactics are specific actions you can take to meet your marketing strategy. They are appropriate for your target market and relevant to your marketing strategy and goal.

For example, if you’re an Internet marketer, and your strategy to get traffic is to get a first page ranking on Google, you need at least the following tactics.:

Do keyword research and pick keywords that relate to your topic and niche while providing enough targeted traffic to monetize your site or blog.

Do on-site optimization by considering keyword density, length of articles, etc.

Do off site optimization by getting back links from high PageRank sites.

On the other hand, If your strategy is to use social networking for traffic, you need different tactics:

You need to pick the social network sites that will best reach your target market and bring market members to your site.

You have to have a consistent presence on the networking sites that you choose

You have to become a respected member who contributes.

Each set of tactics will help you to better implement one strategy than the other. So you have to know your strategy before you decide what marketing tactics to use.

Click to read about the differences in marketing ideas and marketing tactics.

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Posted 7-30-08: Do You Use Marketing Tactics?

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Not having a marketing strategy is one of the biggest marketing mistakes that I see small business owners make.

Do you use a marketing strategy? Do you understand the difference in a marketing strategy, a marketing tactic, and a marketing idea?

I’ve been monitoring some business forums looking for what people most want from marketing. I’ve found that the most inquiries and questions relate to “Give me a marketing strategy to do ___________.” Yet context reveals that they are really wanting marketing ideas.

So my posts for the next few days will define the difference between and explain the need for a marketing strategy, marketing tactics, and marketing ideas. This post will define a marketing strategy and explain why you need one.

What Is A Marketing Strategy?

A marketing strategy is the overall marketing plan that will enable you to reach your marketing and business goals. It represents how your plan to accomplish what you need to do in order for your marketing to succeed.

For instance, if you are an Internet marketer, you have to get traffic to your site in order to be successful. That is a marketing goal that all Internet marketers share. But how you plan to reach that goal may differ from many other Internet marketers.

You may have a strategy that involves being ranked on the first page of Google for a specific keyword. Or you may instead concentrate on social networking to bring traffic.
These are strategies that require multiple tactics to implement.

You have to know your marketing strategy before you can select the best marketing ideas to use as your marketing tactics. Tomorrow’s post will provide more information on marketing tactics.

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Posted 7-29-08: Do You Use A Marketing Strategy?

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If you’re an Internet marketer, you need to know your target market. But this can be especially difficult for Internet marketers.Market segmentation can give you vital information about your target market.

Trying to market on the Internet without knowing who your target market members are, is like shooting blindfolded with a bouncing target.

Unfortunately, many Internet marketers depend totally on keywords without trying to discover anything about the people who use those keywords.

I call that marketing madness because it just throws time and money at marketing with little return on investment.

What Do You Know About Your Target Market?

The easiest way to work with a target market is to target a market like yourself. You already know how you react, and many of those reactions can be generalized to others like you.

The problem comes when your target market is not like you. This is often the case today if you, like many Internet marketers, select a niche based on the number of searches for a keyword and the number of competing sites.

How do you know how target market member’s in these niches will react?
How do you know the best appeals to reach them?
How do you know how to focus your Web site or blog to appeal to them?

You must conduct research.

What Type of Market Research Do You Do?

As an Internet marketer if you want to succeed online, good market research is vital.

Keyword research, monitoring forums and groups, and talking to people are important first steps, but are not enough. Once you’ve learned demographics from these types of research, you can use those demographics to discover much more about your target market, by using market segmentation.

Market segmentation provides a way of using demographic information to determine psychographic, sociographic and behavioral characteristics that enable you to discover the best appeals for your target market.

You can read about the role of gender in internet marketing.

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Posted 7-28-08: Internet Marketers Need To Know Their Target Markets

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Are you making false assumptions about your target market members?

We often assume that other people think as we do and from the same level of experience and information. But this false assumption can result in lost sales and damaged relationships.

A Story

Let me demonstrate some potential pitfalls with a story about my daughter when she was four, I was trying to teach her to dress herself. She was doing well except for her panties. She kept putting them on backwards.

Many times, I had laid out her panties in front of her and told her that the wider side was the back and the narrow side was the front. She could recognize the front from the back of her panties, yet she continued to put them on backwards.

I couldn’t understand why until one day when I was repeating this explanation, she said, “but Mommy, what is the front and back of me?”

Once I explained the front and back of her body to go with the front and back of the panties, she never put her panties on backwards again.

I assumed that she had information that she didn’t have, and because of that false assumption, all my attempts to help her were in vain.

Do You Make Similar Mistakes?

Now this may seem an extreme example because she was a child and I an adult, but I see business owners making similar mistakes due to false assumptions about their target market member’s knowledge and experiences.

The more you know about your target market, the more likely you are to avoid such mistakes and the lost sales and damaged relationships that they cause.

How Much Do You Know About Your Target Market?

You can start building knowledge about your target market with a free target market report. Your report will reveal the most shared characteristics and best appeals for your target market instantly. Click on the link in this sentence to get your target market analysis.

You can then flesh out your report with my e-book, Know ‘em Sell ‘em: How To Discover The Best Appeals For Your Target Market. And you can save $10 by purchasing it from the one-time offer page after you register for AutoMarketAnalysis.com.

Would You Like A Free Customized Target Market Report?

You can start learning about your target market quickly and easily by getting your free target market report and Know ‘em Sell ‘em.

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Posted 7-25-08: False Assumptions About Your Target Market

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