In these days, the art of marketing is much more complex than ever. However, some basic principles still apply in the real marketing world. The following are some of them I would like to share with all of you.
Know your audience.
Successful marketing happens because the marketers know about their audience. They fully understand their needs, how to help meet those needs and how to create demand. Knowing and understanding your audience means a well targeted campaign that generates a profitable return.
To be some more specific in localization industry, clients are becoming increasingly harsh about price. Knowing your clients’ expectation will be much of help, otherwise it will be totally a wasted of time no matter how much conversion made. This is the bare essential that everything get started and over.
Focus on what you can offer.
Apart from the sensitive element price, then please focus on what you can offer if you want to be successful. Have a detail and careful analysis whether if you are really capable to meet the clents’ needs rather than just bragging, giving empty promises etc.
Never try to get a client by cheating, then you need make double/triple and even more efforts to make it up. There are so many marketers fail because they sell on price alone. This leads to a discounting war, lower profitability. So why not focusing on what you can really creating for the clients?
Consistent messaging.
There are some interesting statistics figures about marketing
1% of the sales is realized after the first contact
2% of the sales is realized after the first follow-up
5% of the sales is realized after the second follow-up
12% of the sales is realized after the third follow-up
80% of the sales is realized after the forth – eleventh follow-up So do not be frustrated if you have not got any positive answers from your target clients, try to stand in their shoes and think for them, then keep on staying in touch with them and let them know you are always there for them. Then, there will be a time they will get back to you.
Integrated Marketing Works Best.
You can’t rely on one form of marketing to carry you to success. It’s fine to generate most of your leads or sales through one certain way of marketing but what happens when that dries out? Use multiple media sources to meet your goals. Doing marketing in a localization company will be not easy for us to diversify marketing methods, but we can still have some attempts, like video marketing, website page marketing, which will be some more creative and eye-catching.
Nothing can replace your actual experience.
You can be prepared by papers quite well and perfectly, but there will be much time your book will make no sense. How to answer your clients’ sharp and sensitive questions, how to request more time if the client gave a very urgent deadline, how to even refuse projects…it is all about experience. Nothing can replace actual experience. It will make you a stronger marketer and more successful in the long term.
Part Two, soon coming…