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Posted by
Mohini Puranik
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Last month, I went on a day trip for a short break to enjoy
alone time. I traveled by public transport bus. We had to wait almost an hour
for the journey to begin. In the meantime, some sellers entered the bus,
promoting and selling, their products. Although, I was there in the bus to leave
behind everyday stresses, brain can’t really stop thinking about work. I learned
some crucial marketing lessons and the reasons of marketing campaigns' failure from the small duration bus marketing campaign.
Various sellers marketed their products
by brief yet trained presentations. Afterward, they showed their products to every
traveler. The items were artificial jewelry, books for primary school students,
and pain balm.
This idea to reach travelers in public transport buses
sounds nice at a first glance. However, people didn’t seem to show much
interest in knowing the products; forget about buying them.
Why did people ignore all the marketing tactics?
Despite creating a perfect campaign plan, sometimes some
missteps get ignored in the implementation, which may result in complete
failure of the campaign.
1. The marketing campaign was targeted to the wrong group of people.
Men and women of all ages, from various educational
backgrounds and professions sounds like an ideal comprehensive market for any
product. However, a rule in simple words is, everything isn’t needed by everybody.
Jewelry could be appealing to women, but due to safety reasons, nobody was
interested in using it. Primary school students’ books could be useful for a particular
age group of people. Therefore, only a few percentages of people in each bus
would count the potential group. Considering daily marketing in most of the
buses, overall people just interested in buying would be almost one per cent or
lesser. In addition, parents generally prefer to buy all the required books for
their kids from school books and stationary shops. State transport bus wasn’t the right place to sell books for
primary school students.
Let’s compare the above scenario with social media
marketing. Various social media channels are available for free and promoted
marketing campaigns. You can start your own business pages and gain followers
and engagement. Nevertheless, not every social networking site can be effective
for every product or service. (Same rule again.) Depending on interaction
styles, hashtag usage, image and links’ influence, and most importantly, the active
users’ age group, impact of various social sites changes. Careful research to
meet the goals is needed before launching the promotional drive.
2. Marketing the products without branding.
The products mentioned weren’t well-known brands. People had
never seen or heard about them from someone they know. For small businesses, it
can be quite difficult to get a celebrity brand ambassador or show celebrity
endorsements via ads. People love to buy the products from the brands, they
have heard somewhere from someone they trust. By presenting the books to
educational bookstalls or pain balm to chemists, actual sales could be
increased. This correction would help
the promoters reaching right targeted audience with endorsement from trusted
shops.
In online marketing
referral links and social media sharing can be functional to spread a word
about the product instead of pouring a lot of money on adverts only. In
addition, in the era of social media marketing, we trust likes, shares and
retweets from our network.
Focusing on real social media sharing and communication surely helps in
branding.
3. Ineffective advert or presentation:
The presentation seemed ineffective because it was not
lively. The sellers didn’t have eye-contact with the people in the bus while speaking. It was clearly
noticeable that the promoters were repeating some memorized words. The effect of liveliness just not limited to offline life but while
marketing online by blogs or social
media it’s greatly positive to connect with your
readers and followers by natural communication.
A simple smile and smiley
icon can win hearts.
The mistake many of us get tempted to follow in online world
is sending automated replies and direct messages. Automated posts don’t help as
people are used to ignoring them.
4. Touch the emotions and Match the needs.
Remember the incidents getting emotional after watching emotional ads? The products couldn’t relate with the audience and their
emotions and couldn’t match with their needs. I emphasize, in marketing, emotions first and then needs,
this is how people feel about the advert. During designing a product or
planning a service to offer, prime importance is of course to provide a
solution to people’s problems.
Winning Tactic despite Campaign Failure.
Despite all the rejections, the marketers didn’t feel sad or
rejected and moved on to the next bus for the search of new customers with hope.
Rejections shouldn’t be taken personally. Reasons of rejection could be any of
the above-explained ones. None of the reasons is about the person who was
selling. It was perhaps a strategic mistake in training the workforce, as we all
are told to follow rules strictly.
Never take any rejection personally, instead, be optimistic
and identify and eliminate the mistakes.
Final Thoughts:
Marketing campaigns are worth the investment at the places/channels
where your buyers are present, where they need your product or service, where
they value the quality that your product provides and are willing to pay for
it.
The success of marketing campaigns is dependent on accurate
planning and implementation of the strategies.
From my personal
experiences, I have followed the rules and also loved to break or tweak them to move
ahead. Remember, no rule is final.
Recommended Articles on Branding and Strategic Planning:
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- Four Strategies to Build Twitter Presence for Successful Hashtag Campaigns
- 6 Marketing Lessons We can Learn from Vegetable Vendors
- 5 Strategies to Optimize Social Media Productivity
You can join me on Twitter @mohinipuranik .
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