Watching TV, listening to the radio or going for a walk, all these situations have one thing in common: advertising. Advertising has become so pervasive in our lives that we learn to block it out. The consequence is that many marketing campaigns fail to actually reach an audience; despite their best efforts, companies fail to reach their marketing goals.
Any marketing action that is initiated must follow a series of steps to avoid being lost in oblivion and just another expense with no return on investment. First, a marketing study must be performed to determine the needs of users that aren’t being met by any other competitor’s product or service, since behind these unmet needs good business opportunities can be found.
From this information, a study can then be developed on the types of costumers we wish to reach, their preferences, product expectations, investment capacity, etc. Everything should be done with a clear objective: to determine the most suitable distribution, advertising and product or service sales strategies to use.
Once we know the profile of our customers, we must make sure that our company is developing a new quality product. This process must never end, since we must convert the product or service that we offer into something living, in other words, something constantly evolving. This way, it will never become obsolete and we will be able to continue to fulfill our customers’ expectations.
If this is basically the line followed by the marketing departments of the big and medium organizations to advertise and to market their products, the following question must be asked: Why doesn’t their advertising reach their potential customers and why do their marketing campaigns fail?
Modernize or stop selling
Advertising messages are everywhere and customers no longer relate to them. Among other things, this is because they are too generic. In order to be effective, modern marketing supposes design and development strategies, personalized approaches and messages, based on prior knowledge of the customers. In order to reach them, there must be complete integration of acquired customer knowledge with the different departments of an organization: administrative, marketing, after sales, etc.
This integration is much easier to realize thanks to the implementation of Information Technology. Nowadays we have different tools that allow us to effectively design and develop complete marketing strategies.
Customer Relationship Management, commonly known as CRM, started in the 90’s as an answer to the need of companies to automate their processes for handling large volumes of customer data. Many organizations made strong investments to acquire this type of software.
Years later, companies that have this technology still see it only as an automation tool, in other words, a solution for determining the needs of their customers. But CRM is really much more than this. Marketing departments can obtain great benefits from this technology: determining with accurate information what are the real requirements of their customers and how to meet them, and focusing on new markets to find potential customers or new business opportunities in areas in which they are already working. These are just a few of the opportunities that CRM offers.
Correctly implementing this software in a company supposes the implication of different departments of the organization, especially those dealing with customers, since they’ll be afforded more information that enables them to continue to be knowledgeable of their markets, improve their customer relationships, engender customer loyalty, and acquire more profitability.
Web 2.0, an opportunity
Social networks and blogs have become a great opportunity for Marketing departments. Sites such as MySpace, Facebook and Twitter enable companies to create profiles on pages designed for very concrete types of audiences, which traditional advertising is totally indifferent to. Blogs are being used by many companies to market their products or to develop new brand images, since they allow more informal dialog with customers, and they can be used, for example, to test whether or not a new product works.
Press releases specifically aimed at customers are another way Web 2.0 is used to advertise certain business products or services. Companies deliver their press releases to different web sites that index them and send them to their subscribers.
Finally, podcasts enable companies to identify their brands with customers before they decide to buy certain products. How? They use attractive audio programming that grabs the attention of the listeners or TV viewers.
All these tools are democratizing business marketing, since they make it possible to begin marketing strategies without having to make big economic investments. This is because applications like blogs, online videos, online advertising, etc., are much more accessible than the traditional advertising resources. Thus, small and medium companies can compete with the big organizations by designing and developing original and effective marketing strategies.
Even easier and more affordable
Even though Web 2.0 offers companies different options to efficiently begin new and effective marketing strategies, the fact that there are so many options can make selecting the company that best suits their needs more complicated. This can also cause their marketing actions to fail and to obtain a less than desirable return on their investments.
To avoid this, there are other options that may be the same or more accessible than the ones discussed thus far, and of course, much less complicated. One option in particular is Transpromo. Transpromo is a marketing concept that emerged from combining transactional documents (receipts, bills, delivery notes, etc.) with advertising messages.
How does it work? One of the biggest marketing problems, as we’ve already pointed out, is the difficulty of grabbing and holding the attention of the intended audience of our advertising. However, we all pay attention to documents that include information that we consider important to us. Phone bills, energy bills or certain contracts immediately get our attention, and generally, we can find the time to meticulously study these documents.
Since this is the case, it would be in our interests when developing a marketing strategy to include advertising messages with transactional information. This way, we would get the attention of the audience and also directly deliver our message.
We must also bear in mind that bank statements and bills are usually viewed by the people they’re addressed to more than just once. Because of this, our advertising messages are not only viewed but also retained in peoples’ memories, which can be a determining factor when they decide to acquire a product or service similar to the one included in the transactional document.
Marking the difference
Transpromo documents are different from other advertising formulas used in mail advertising. Some companies invest a lot of money to include their advertising in their correspondence with their customers. But normally this is in the form of independent leaflets or brochures that don’t really reach their customers, since they normally take out the transactional document and throw away the advertising without even looking at it.
DocPath tools enable advertising to be embedded in the receipts, bills and contracts themselves. This way we get peoples’ attention as it is unlikely that they’d throw these types of documents away without first looking them over.
The technologies available in the market nowadays provide all the required resources for creating and distributing high quality Transpromo documents. The key in the process is in creating attractive documents from a visual and design perspective that contain a personalized message and include the most appropriate content for the types of customers for which they are intended. Additionally, the process must support changing the marketing message according to the company’s needs. In other words, the documents must be designed in such a way that document generation is totally dynamic and it allows the marketing department to decide, up to the last minute which messages to include in the documents.
Flexibility, scalability and integration with their business applications are some things that a customer looking for this type of solution must bear in mind. DocPath is familiar with all these marketing requirements and can satisfy them, for which today, DocPath is a leader in document technology.
Julio Olivares,
President and Founder of DocPath