Over the past couple of weeks, we have shared some tips on designing a good marketing strategy and social media marketing. After laying some good foundations, here is the exciting part that most people would love to work on, creating the marketing campaign itself. In this series of posts, we will be sharing a total of five key principles that will help to give you more firepower in your marketing arsenal.
1) Be specific in your target audience
We have heard about this principle very often be it from articles or experts out there that keeps stressing the importance of being specific in your target audience when it comes to marketing. We cannot agree more especially when it comes to designing your marketing campaign.
When you are specific in your target audience, you can be assured that your campaign that will yield the most impact. Having a specific target audience in mind will allow you to create a campaign that will capture both the hearts and minds of your intended audience. Being able to create an emotive connection through your campaigns is a powerful tool as it ultimately leads to an increase in sales and customer loyalty.
Knowing your specific target audience will help in the downstream planning parameters such as which type of medium you will choose to disseminate your information, places where the campaign will take place and the products you will choose to feature. Having a clear plan and outcome in mind will allow you to utilise your resources effectively and efficiently, ensuring that your marketing dollars is well spent and stretched to achieve maximum results. This is especially useful for F&B businesses that are working on a relatively limited marketing budget but yet is required to generate awareness in the market.
Here is a simple example to illustrate this point: If your restaurant/café is located near a school, you may wish to single out the students from that particular school as your target for promotions, instead of casting your net across the huge mass market of demographics (e.g. teenagers) that will exhaust more resources and bring about lesser impact. Chances of the students responding will be a lot higher as well due to the proximity and target approach of the campaign.
2) Get creative
The basic tenets of marketing tools will always remain the same over time; we are referring to regular discounts, giveaways, free sampling etc. over here. However, there is always room for creativity in the area of delivery, structure, copywriting and visuals. Needless to say, there are plenty of eye-catching promotions or collaterals designed to capture the attention of consumers. Hence, creativity is almost considered a must-have ingredient in order to stand out in this game.
Getting ‘creative’ does not always require everyone to have brainstorming and ideating sessions all the time. To make the process simple, consider how you can leverage upon geographical or physical locations, timing/seasons or events taking place near your restaurant.
One interesting example that caught our attention recently was a promotion launched by “Carpenter and Cook” during the season when the haze was pretty bad. They leveraged on the environmental circumstance to give their customers a discount on their coffee and the quantum of the discount is dependent on what the prevailing PSI index during the hour (this implies that if the PSI index is 250, customers will get $2.50 off their coffee!). While most restaurants and cafes are lamenting about the poor crowds due to the haze, here we have an example of a creative and opportunistic campaign which allowed the café to shift a negative situation into a positive one.
We hope that you have benefited from our sharing and we will be building more on what we have shared. Stay tuned for more as we will be following up with the remaining principles!
