Small Business Now
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    Your mandate is to increase sales for your new product or service. What you need now is a strong promotional campaign that will ensure a successful rollout. Not sure where to start? Just follow these five important steps:

Step 1. Craft Your Message

    Your marketing campaign will require a sound creative theme or message. Consider the hot buttons and special needs of your specific target audience members. What unique benefits and features will your product or service provide to them? Factor in what you know about your competition and focus on the benefits (key selling points) that will help you position against them. Above all, your creative message should communicate how what you offer will add value above and beyond what’s currently available in the marketplace. This distinction – a vital means of differentiation – should become an integral part of the creative message.

    Using this information, write a brief, one paragraph creative platform. This simple document will be essential to development of all your marketing materials, from brochures and ads to press releases.

Step 2. Scale Your Campaign

    This step is important for small-business owners that sell directly to other businesses or consumers. Marketing in its many forms exists solely to support sales. Before embarking on any promotional campaign, decide exactly how your company will support the leads and sales generated and scale your marketing program accordingly. For example, if you have a three-person sales team and each of these individuals can handle approximately 20 leads a week, engaging in a campaign that would throw 40 leads per week in their path would be disastrous, resulting in frustrated prospects and bad word-of-mouth – two elements that could immediately torpedo your efforts. Plus, overreaching also involves overspending, so decide in advance exactly what you want to see happen and create a marketing campaign scaled to meet that goal.

Step 3. Create Pre-Rollout Buzz

    Numerous new product and service offerings get off to a flying start thanks to efforts that build interest and excitement prior to and during a rollout. Depending on what you market, you may benefit from sharing information early with "influentials" or "influencers." Influentials are considered experts in their particular arenas, no matter whether that encompasses digital cameras or cosmetics. They may include product reviewers, bloggers, or influential teens (members of the "in-group"), just to name a few. Influencers are often professionals with direct access to your prospects who are capable of making referrals, or they may be consumers who help guide decisions for others (such as the way middle-aged children of senior parents are often called upon to help choose the best healthcare or nursing home options).

    Some forward-thinking companies now use their Web sites as gathering places for influential "community" members. You can form an advisory group, or merely identify an important set of core customers (influencers), to receive information and invitations to participate in the development of new products or ideas. This is bound to build excitement and get buzz rolling.

Step 4. Win Favorable Press

    Suppose you want to introduce your product or service to a new national market, but don’t have the deep pockets it takes to buy advertising on that level. Solid media relations will let you place stories in well-targeted media. Even with a local story, media relations can jumpstart any product or service introduction, or help you introduce your existing product to a new market niche. The key is to tailor your stories to the needs of the specific media you target. A press release concerning how a new product expansion will benefit the business community is a natural fit for the business section of the local newspaper, for example, while information about the innovative nature of the new technology the product uses will best fit the needs of tech Web sites or trade/industry publications.

    Create a media relations list, taking into consideration the different types of stories you hope to generate. Next, create specific releases to meet the needs of the individual media outlets. Send your releases and follow up by telephone. And have a full press kit handy to send to journalists who are interested in learning more.

5. Place Your Advertising

    The smartest advertising buys are ones that allow you to reach your most qualified prospects in the right context or, best yet, when they’re in a position to buy what you sell. Putting your message in the proper context lets you communicate with your prospects when they’re in precisely the right frame of mind. Suppose you invented a new type of home insulation that you were marketing directly to consumers. A successful media placement would put your ad on a Web page where consumers were reading articles about home insulation and energy savings. You’d reach an audience that was highly qualified and actively interested in what you were selling.

    Where will your best prospects get information on what you plan to market? From pay-per-click advertising on search engines and traditional print and broadcast media opportunities, through the newest place-based media, there are numerous ways to reach literally every market niche. For superior results, come up with a mix of media that reach qualified prospects in the right context at the right time and your promotional campaign will effectively tackle that new market.