Today is Amazon Prime Day (and Chick-fil-A Dress Like a Cow Day) and it reminded me — Prime, not the cow — of just how brilliant marketing strategies can be when you weave things together.
One of the signs of a genius they say is to be able to see correlations and connections that others do not. The same can be said of a marketing genius. If you want to improve your marketing you need to start using a holistic view. Your promotional marketing is not an island. It must be incorporated into your referral marketing, which is connected into your social media marketing, your content marketing, your marketing collateralls (including brochures, business cards, and postcards), your email marketing…well, you get the idea.
Amazon does this brilliantly. First they create a service called Prime, where people pay a flat fee for free two-day shipping. This is genius because it is now more convenient to order online than go to a store down the street or across town. (Walmart has recently launched a similar program.) But we’re not here to talk about the genius of Prime. We’re talking connected marketing. Amazon also offers a trial of Prime for free. Next they create their own savings holiday — Prime Day, where only Prime members receive discounts, and they make the discounts as large as Black Friday. Now they’ve given people an additional reason to join.
We don’t all have the deep pockets of the retail giant, nor do we have the technology, but we can look at your marketing and search for opportunities for interconnections. Your promotional marketing item should speak to who you are as a company; your social media should convey your culture; as should your email marketing. Your content marketing should act as a resource and at the same time help people get to know, like, and trust you and there should be components that tie it all together in a cohesive structure.
Excellence in today’s marketing doesn’t tell customers that they need a product. It reminds them that they have a problem, and your product or service is the solution. The most effective way to do this is through a cohesive strategy. Use your promotional item as part of that strategy and stop buying solely on unit price.
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