As an advertising, marketing and promotions site, our customers are always looking for better ways to increase their brand awareness for their business, products or services. Education is a great way to do that. It`s one of the main reasons why we write these informative articles and publish a daily business podcast for our customers and our potential customers.



With that said, lets focus in on marketing tactics, and how some tactics, when used properly can increase your businesses awareness to consumers. This article, mostly geared toward the product distribution business, can be tweaked a bit to meet the needs of our service oriented customers. Don`t forget to contact us through our website, if you need help in doing so.

Lets focus in on relationship marketing tactics, what they are, and what you must do in order to make them work to your benefit. You need to create awareness between your brand, products and your customers. For companies like Nike, Coke, Pepsi, etc, it`s easy. They have been doing it for years and have multi-million dollar budgets. You only need to see a "swoosh" and you know which company it is. That`s excellent brand awareness.

For your purposes, you need to figure out what drives your customer. How do they spend their day? How can your product assist them in making their life easier, or maybe a little more fun? Once you realize how your product appeals to your customer, you can then focus your advertising efforts on hitting that emotional need that your clients will respond to. For example, lets say you sell shoe inserts that make walking more comfortable. Off the top of my head I can tell you your target market is probably people who do a lot of walking, running or standing around. Now gear an advertising campaign that maybe shows a person rubbing their feet because they are sore from all of the walking they do, and then follow it up with a happy person after they have used your inserts. You get the point.

This campaign hits two emotional points. One being, associating with and understanding a person`s discomfort from doing a lot of walking, running or standing around, and two, being able to make them feel better. Who doesn`t want to feel better, right?

The key to relationship marketing is to actually build one. Sounds like common sense right? But you`d be surprised how many businesses will just throw advertisements out there and hope people will respond to them. What you actually need to do, is create a promotion where you are responding to the customer. Haven`t you ever gone through the day and maybe said something like, "it would make life easier, if I could do.." this. Whatever, `this` is?

As you can see that is an emotional need that can be filled. If you have the product or service that can accommodate, you would be able to create a campaign to respond to the customer.

Now get out there and build relationships with your customers and/or potential customers by creating promotional campaigns that fill their emotional needs.

By: Bruce A. Tucker