Influencing the Market
Effective Influence over the market means the ability to find, attract, convert, keep and grow any target audience to your customer base, and keep them there producing revenues and profits..
Everthing done in marketing, sales, product/service development and customer service is meant to influence prospects to buy and customers to buy again. Some influence is direct to prospects and some is thru intermediary influencers like the press and analysts. But all actions are meant to give you influence over the market - the ability to set and change beliefs and actions in the short range, and strength and quality of relationships in the long term.
Touch points are the places where influence attempts are aimed and are usually specified by who or what does the touching in the seller organization, and how their effectiveness is measured. There is a lot of talk about touch points, much of it mindless, these days. For example, a list of touch points often leaves out the product or service which is by far the main touch point and influence on relationships.
All ways to influence the market have several things in common: content - the message that is intended to move the target to the next stage in the pipeline, media-how the message will get to the target, a target audience and a desired response by the target audience member. Every campaign needs to specify each of these and measure if the desired response is achieved in the target audience. The best way is to do this is by testing ahead of the rollout. Techtel's Message Testing and Go-To-Market Testing allow this.
With a portfolio of influence tools (Advertising, PR, Events, Web, Communities, etc.) the goal is to move Prospects from stage to stage in the pipeline' from non awareness to awareness to consideration to evaluation to purchase, then to stronger levels of relationship and repurchase. Recently, there has been a lot of excitement and interest in new social media, not necessarily because it's new but because it's newly effective. But there has been little new in content and message with any proven long-term implications. With the ability to test multiple messages in the market quickly, you can get very innovative and accelerate your learning cycle. Use Techtel's Message Testing and Go-To-Market Testing for this. And if it works for you, we can set it up as part of your Process Effectiveness improvements, to do every time.
Related Topics
On Effectively Communicating with Buyers, Customers and Users