Guidelines for effective marketing:

What should hospitality, tourism and entertainment industry mangers think about when before conducting marketing? In this section we look at the some of the core issues surrounding a marketing development as well as some lessons from previous successes and failures.

What is marketing?

Marketing is sometimes thought to simply be the activities of advertising and promotion. In reality it is much more than this. Marketing is the ongoing process whereby an organisation gets the right product or service, at the right price, at the right time and place, with the right promotion, and most importantly to do all this and make a profit. In order to achieve this many organisations decide to create a marketing plan.

What should an marketing plan encapsulate?

Your marketing plan should include broad strategies and plans as well as all advertising, entertainment, marketing and promotional (AEMP) activities.

Objectives:

Before you develop your marketing, plan it is important to have detailed objectives of what is to be achieved by the process. These should take into account the following points:

• The organisations mission and vision statements

• Corporate objectives

• Financial objective

• Long term objectives

Marketing strategy & research:

In order to know how to market your organisation to potential customers, it is necessary to know what will work and what will not. For this reason, developing a broad strategy as part of your marketing plan is very important.

It is imperative that businesses conduct adequate research before launching into this stage of their marketing plan. The history of marketing is littered with many examples of companies rushing their marketing research only for their advertising to end in failure. When Pepsi started selling their products in China, they used the following slogan "Pepsi brings you back to life", unfortunately this translated to Chinese as "Pepsi will bring your ancestors back from the grave". When vacuum manufacturer Electrolux entered the American market their campaign slogan was: "Nothing sucks like an Electrolux".

So what are the main strategic considerations for hospitality, leisure and entertainment companies? Key points are listed below:

• Who are our customers?

  • Where do they live?
  • How old are they?
  • What characteristics do they have?
    
  • Why do they use our products and or services?
  • What price and quality do they expect?
  • Who are the decision makers in the household? (ie: kids, wife, husband)
    

• What is the best way to reach our customers? It is important to know what types of media reaches your customers (or potential customers). There is no point advertising on the radio if most of your customers don't listen to one.

• What are our competitors doing?

  • Can we improve on the way they advertise?
  • What differentiates us from them?
  • What can we do to attract entice their customers?

• The Four P's: It can be useful to analyse your products and services according to the four p's. These are as follows:

  • Product/Service: Is our product and or service actually demanded by customers? How is it branded?
  • Place/convenience: Are we in the right location for the sort of product or service we are trying to sell?
  • Price: What price do we need in order to both attract customers and make a healthy profit?
  • Promotion: What media should we use to promote our product? How should we target the customers?
    

Collecting this sort of information is sometimes difficult. Analysing membership/customer databases, conducting customer surveys, analysis of revenue trends and general interaction with customers can give some insight.

At the end of all this, you should be able to articule your marketing strategy or strategies.

Example marketing strategy: We will market our products and services couple families with no children "empty nesters", aged 45-65, with advertisements in print media and with local sponsorship.

Action planning:

This stage of the plan is where the broad objectives and strategies are taken and broken into many individual tasks. This is the practical component of the marketing plan and should meet the following guidelines:

• Tasks need to be clear and detail exactly what is going to occur

• Tasks need to be allocated to particular individuals or committees

• Outcomes should be quantified so later they can be measured to determine success

• Timeframes should be set (the marketing plans timeframe generally should not exceed 1-2 years)

• Objectives and tasks need to be achievable

• A consensus needs to be reached and tasks agreed upon

• The plan should be regularly reviewed and modified if necessary
  

Advertising and Promotions:

This section provides guidelines for the general advertising, entertainment, marketing and promotional activities.

Advertising:

Among other things, advertising aims to increase public awareness about a particular firm, create goodwill for the business, offer specific products or services, arouse a potential customer's curiosity.

There are four rules of advertising:

1. Aim: What is the purpose of the advert? Is it to inform, sell, engage or create awareness?

2. Target: Who is the target? Retirees, young families, young couples, individuals, males/females....

3. Media: Which media will be most effective? Television, radio, newspapers, letterbox brochures? It is important to remember that hospitality venues generally cater to a particular local area. That is they draw their customers from the area immediately surrounding the venue. This characteristic is driven by the convenience for patrons. So what does this mean for in terms of advertising media? Letterbox brochure and leaflet drops are going to be more effective when measured against cost than say blanket media like television and radio.

4. Competitors: What advertising methods does your competition use? Is this successful?

Once these questions have been answered and the advert (in whatever form it takes) has been created, it is time to test it. Questions like:

• Does it standout?

• Does it arouse curiosity?

• Does it create a need/desire?

• Does it motivate someone to buy your products and or services?

Promotions:

By promotions we refer to activities such as competitions, prizes, special events and merchandise. It is important to remember that all dealings with individuals or businesses outside of your business can be utilised as promotion. When deciding on how to conduct a promotion the following points need to be considered:

1. Aim: What is the purpose of the promotion? Your promotion needs to increases sales and or increase visitation to your venue.

2. Activity: There are hundreds of different types of promotional activities that a business can conduct. It is a good idea to match your aims with a list of possible activities then analyse each activity listing pros and cons. What is the competition doing and is this working?

3. Particulars: When conducting a promotion, its important to consider the details. These include the length of time the promotion will run, associated costs and the promotions structure. For example if you are going to have a major give away on a particular date, it is important that there are many small giveaways on the lead up to that date.

The 80/20 Rule:

Throughout the entire process of producing a marketing plan, businesses should never forget the 80/20 rule. The 80/20 rule states that 80% of sales and revenue come from 20% of customers. This rule is usually true of products and services also, 80% of sales and revenue come from 20% of the products and services a firm has on offer. Firms that ignore that 20% of customers or products and services do so at their own peril.

Three times exposure rule:

The three times exposure simply means that potential customers are far more likely to remember your product and or service if they are exposed to your advertisement three or more times. For example, this is why some companies choose to run their adverts on television, bill boards and in magazines all at the same time.