• Define a structured strategy to achieve business/marketing goals.
• Serve as a roadmap for aligning activities with objectives.
• Creates focus, resource efficiency, and alignment across teams.

Marketing Objectives

Specific approaches to achieve objectives. Clear goals that guide efforts.

• Specific: Identify clear targets (e.g., “Increase market share in North America”).
• Measurable: Use quantifiable metrics (e.g., “Grow email subscribers 25%”).
• Attainable/Achievable: Given current resources/market conditions.
• Relevant: Tied to broader business goals.
• Timely/Time Bound: Define a timeframe for achieving objectives.

Value Proposition

Unique value your product offers that solves a problem or meets a need.

• What customer problem does the product address?
• How does it create better value than competitors?

Positioning Strategy’s Outline

• Target Market Perception: Define how want the audience to see your product
• Key Benefits & Values: Identify the main benefits that will attract the target market.
• Competitive Positioning: Analyze competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. Highlight your product’s superior attributes.

Identifying Competitive Advantage

• Features that make a product unique and attractive
• Helps build customer loyalty
• Provides leverage for marketing campaigns

Partnerships & Alliances

• Strategic collaborations to amplify reach and resources.
• Allows companies to share resources and risks.
• Enhances credibility and visibility.

Types of Partnerships

• Co-Branding: Collaborate with an established brand to leverage trust and reach.
• Influencer Collaborations: Partner with influencers to target niche audiences.
• Distribution Alliances: Work with retailers to expand market presence.

Marketing Budget & Resource Allocation

Distribution of financial resources.

• Digital Advertising: Social media, PPC, and display ads.
• Content Creation: Videos, blogs, and infographics.
• Events and Sponsorships: Trade shows, webinars, or community events.
• Considerations for Budgeting: Focus on high-ROI activities. Setting aside funds for contingencies/testing.

Implementation Timeline

Implementation schedule and performance measures.

• Organizes tasks for efficiency.
• Ensures accountability and progress tracking.

Implementation Plan Example

• Weeks 1-2: Conduct market research and finalize campaign strategy.
• Weeks 3-6: Roll out digital and social media campaigns.
• Weeks 7-8: Monitor performance and adjust campaigns based on metrics.
• Week 9: Conduct customer surveys to gather feedback.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

• Metrics to evaluate marketing success.
• Enables data-driven decisions.
• Identifies areas for improvement.

Summary of the Marketing Plan

1. Objectives: Clear, SMART goals to guide efforts.
2. Strategies: Well-defined value proposition and positioning.
3. Action Plans: Specific tactics for achieving objectives.
4. Budget & Timeline: Efficient allocation of resources and timely execution.
5. KPIs: Metrics for tracking and refining strategies.
6. Outcome: Cohesive approach to achieving business success.

The post How to Create a Marketing Campaign appeared first on Nic Tustin, BA Econ.

Music2Go marketing simulation is a platform by Smartsims designed to explain and illustrate the core marketing terms and concepts. Concepts are introduced as the simulation progresses throughout the rollovers. Users are responsible over price, retail margin, sales forecast, sales promotion, product development, product launch and advertising decisions.

Music2Go Ranking

• Total Marketing Contribution (TMC): $1,301,753,652
• Marketing Contribution (MC): $319,076,997
• Music2Go Single-Player (2024/2025): 1^st
• Music2Go Single-Player (All-Time): 2^nd
• Date: April 2025
• Rollovers: 8

Fanshawe College Report

Music2Go Hints & Tips

Your goal is try to increase your Marketing Contribution so that it is higher than your competitors. Lost sales shows how many more units could have been sold if a given firm had ordered more stock. This is unsatisfied excess demand for a product.

Increase Market Share

• Decrease Retail Price
• Increase/Improve Advertising
• Increase Distribution Coverage
• Increase/Improve Sales Promotion
• Spec Improvement Development

Increase Profitability

• Cost Reduction Development
• Decrease Retail Margin

Retail Price

The recommended retail price range is a guideline. You can price higher or lower than this, but be aware it becomes harder to cover your costs if you price too low, and you may lose market share if you price too high.

Retail Margin

Distribution Coverage is the proportion of consumers who can buy a product in the places that they normally shop. Even though having a lower Retail Price would create more sales, there became a need to strike a balance between an above average price Retail Margin to ensure Distribution Coverage was not neglected.

Sales Forecast

The Forecast Demand is an estimate of the likely size of each market segment for next year. Enter your sales forecast for the year ahead to determine required inventory. A Sales Forecast (Units) goal can be to increase market share by a percentage each rollover.

• Forecast Market Demand This Year * Current Market Share * (1 + Percentage Increase)

Advertising

Product Awareness is the percentage of potential customers who remember your product and would mention it if asked to list some specific headphones. This is affected by how much you spend on Advertising, how efficiently you allocate it across the media channels, and how much past accumulated advertising awareness there is for a product. This was calculated by multiplying the Media Viewing Habits by the Advertising Media Reach to decide on an optimal advertising mix. Focusing on one or two advertising strategies created the highest amount of Awareness for the allocated budget.

Sales Promotion

Sales Promotion is a rating from 1 to 100 which indicates the effectiveness of each product’s activities. This is based on a combination of the sales promotion expenditure and the promotion mix effectiveness. Each promotional activity has particular relevance to certain stages of the product life cycle. New products start in the Growth phase then over the next six rollovers they gradually transition from to Mature, and eventually the Decline phase.

Music Segment

Gaming Segment

Fitness Segment

Development

The Product Specs is a rating from 1 to 100 that measures how close your product is to an ideal product in each market segment. You may have dumped obsolete inventory units if you improved your product with product development. Your existing stock of finished goods is sold off cheaply to an overseas market because consumers prefer to buy your latest product designs. This usually results in an inventory disposal loss, but this is likely to be lower than the inventory holding cost of storing all those finished goods and the cost savings of improving your product design.

• Cost Reduction Development for every product.
• Spec Improvement for every product.

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Search engine optimization (SEO) is about helping search engines and users discover your content. When building your website, create it with your users in mind, aiming to make it easy for them to find and explore your content. Google is a fully automated search engine that uses programs called crawlers to explore the web constantly, looking for pages to add to its index. You usually don’t need to do anything except publish your site on the web. The vast majority of sites listed in our results are found and added automatically.

How Long Until I See Impact in Search Results?

Every change you make will take some time to be reflected on Google’s end. Some changes might take effect in a few hours, others could take several months. In general, you likely want to wait a few weeks to assess whether your work had beneficial effects on Google Search results. Keep in mind that not all changes you make to your website will result in a noticeable impact on search results. If you’re not satisfied with your results and your business strategies allow it, try iterating with the changes and see if they make a difference.

Help Google Find Your Content

Google primarily finds pages through links from other pages it has already crawled. In many cases, these are other websites that are linking to your pages. Other sites linking to you is something that happens naturally over time, and you can also encourage people to discover your content by promoting your site. You could also submit a sitemap, which is a file that contains all the URLs on your site that you care about. It might be important for you to opt out your site as a whole or sections of it from appearing in search results. Google supports various ways that let you opt out of crawling and indexing of your URLs. While ads are a part of the internet and are meant to be seen by users, don’t let them become overly distracting or prevent your users from reading your content.

• Organize Your Site
• Use Descriptive URLs
• Reduce Duplicate Content
• Avoid Distracting Advertisements
• Write Good Link Text
• Control Your Snippets

Make Your Site Interesting & Useful

When you’re setting up or redoing your site, it can be good to organize it in a logical way because it can help search engines and users understand how your pages relate to the rest of your site. Don’t drop everything and start reorganizing your site right now though. while these suggestions can be helpful long term (especially if you’re working on a larger website), search engines will likely understand your pages as they are right now, regardless of how your site is organized. Parts of the URL can be displayed in search results as breadcrumbs, so users can also use the URLs to understand whether a result will be useful for them. Google learns breadcrumbs automatically based on the words in the URL, but you can also influence them with structured data if you like a technical challenge. Try to include words in the URL that may be useful for users. Having duplicate content on your site is not a violation , but it can be a bad user experience and search engines might waste crawling resources on URLs that you don’t even care about. Creating content that people find compelling and useful will likely influence your website’s presence in search results more than any of the other suggestions in this guide. While “compelling and useful content” can mean different things to different people, content like this generally shares some common attributes, such as:

• Easy to Read: Write content naturally and make sure the content is well written, easy to follow, and free of spelling and grammatical mistakes. Break up long content into paragraphs and sections, and provide headings to help users navigate your pages.
• Unique Content: When you’re writing new content, don’t copy others’ content in part or in its entirety: create the content yourself based on what you know about the topic. Don’t just rehash what others already published.
• Up-to-Date: Check in on previously published content and update it as needed, or even delete it if it’s not relevant anymore.
• People-First: Be sure that you’re writing content that your readers will find helpful and reliable. For example, providing expert or experienced sources can help people understand your articles’ expertise.

Expect Your Readers’ Search Terms

Think about the words that a user might search for to find a piece of your content. Users who know a lot about the topic might use different keywords in their search queries than someone who is new to the topic. Anticipating these differences in search behavior and writing with your readers in mind could produce positive effects on how your site performs in search results. However, don’t worry if you don’t anticipate every variation of how someone might seek your content. Google’s language matching systems are sophisticated and can understand how your page relates to many queries, even if you don’t explicitly use the exact terms in them.

Link to Relevant Resources

Links are a great way to connect your users and search engines to other parts of your site, or relevant pages on other sites. In fact, the vast majority of the new pages Google finds every day are through links, making links a crucial resource you need to consider to help your pages be discovered by Google and potentially shown in search results. Additionally, links can also add value by connecting users (and Google) to another resource that corroborates what you’re writing about.

Link text (also known as anchor text) is the text part of a link that you can see. This text tells users and Google something about the page you’re linking to. With appropriate anchor text, users and search engines can easily understand what your linked pages contain before they visit.

Links can provide more context on a topic, both for users and search engines, which may help demonstrate your knowledge on a topic. However when you’re linking to pages outside of your control, for example content on other sites, make sure you trust the resource you’re linking to.

Influence Your Title Links

The title link is the headline part of the search result and it can help people decide which search result to click. This title text can also be used for the title that’s shown in browsers and bookmarks. You can influence the title links in Search by writing good titles: a good title is unique to the page, clear and concise, and accurately describes the contents of the page. For example, your title could include the name of your website or business, other bits of important information like the physical location of the business, and maybe some information about what the particular page has to offer for users.

A search result typically has a description of the target page to help users decide whether they should click the search result. This is called a snippet. The snippet is sourced from the actual content of the page the search result is linking to, thus you have complete control over the words that can be used to generate the snippet. Occasionally the snippet may be sourced from the contents of the meta description tag, which is typically a succinct, one- or two-sentence summary of the page. A good meta description is short, unique to one particular page, and includes the most relevant points of the page.

Optimize Site Images

Many people search visually, and images can be how people find your website for the first time. As you add images to your site, make sure that people and search engines can find and understand them. When you use high quality images, you give users enough context and detail to decide which image best matches what they were looking for. Use images that are sharp and clear, and place them near text that’s relevant to the image. The text that’s near images can help Google better understand what the image is about and what it means in context to your page. lt text is a short, but descriptive piece of text that explains the relationship between the image and your content. It helps search engines understand what your image is about and the context of how your image relates to your page, so writing good alt text is quite important. This helps Google and users associate the image with text that provides more context to what the page is about. If your website includes pages that are primarily about individual videos, people may also be able to discover your site through video results in Google Search. Many of the best practices for images and text also apply to videos:

• Create high-quality video content, and embed the video on a standalone page, near text that’s relevant to that video.
• Write descriptive text in the titles and description fields of a video (the title of a video is still a title, and so you can apply the best practices for writing titles here too).

Promote Your Website

Effectively promoting your new content will lead to faster discovery by those who are interested in the same subject, and also by search engines. You can do this in many ways:

• Social Media Promotion
• Community Engagement
• Advertisement
• Word of Mouth

The post Search Engine Optimization (SEO) appeared first on Nic Tustin, BA Econ.

Search engine marketing (SEM) is a digital marketing strategy used to increase the visibility of a website in search engine results pages (SERPs). It refers to paid search advertising and is also alternately referred to as paid search or pay-per-click (PPC).

Why is SEM Important?

With an increasing number of consumers researching and shopping for products online, search engine marketing has become a crucial online marketing strategy for increasing a company’s reach. In search engine marketing, advertisers only pay for impressions that result in visitors, making it an efficient way for a company to spend its marketing dollars. As an added bonus, each visitor incrementally improves the website’s rankings in organic search results. Since consumers enter search queries with the intent of finding information of a commercial nature, they are in an excellent state of mind to make a purchase, compared to other sites such as social media where users are not explicitly searching for something. Results are immediate with SEM. It is arguably the fastest way to drive traffic to a website.

How SEM Works

In paid search advertising, sponsored ads appear at the top of and on the side of search engine results pages to gain more visibility and prominence than the organic results. In your search results page, you will come across various company ads whose keywords match the keywords in your search. These ads appear in prominent locations on the page – along with the other search listings that match your keywords. The paid listings are highly relevant to your specific search, making it likely that you will click on them. Text-only ads are easy to produce. Marketers enter a headline, text for the body of the ad, a call-to-action and a URL for the hyperlink. Search engine marketing is considered by many to be the most efficient way to spend marketing dollars. When setting up a campaign within an SEM network, the marketer is prompted to:

• Conduct keyword research and select a set of keywords related to their website or product
• Select a geographic location for the ad to be displayed within
• Create a text-based ad to display in the search results
• Evaluate the cost per click (CPC) of given keywords

Create Ad Copy

Most forms of SEM will allow you to create headlines, descriptions, and ad extensions. Start with compelling headlines that really speak to the search intent behind the keywords you’re targeting. Next, highlight unique selling points in your description so that searchers can get a sense of what they can expect when they click on your ad. Ad extensions are an effective way to maximize your ads with relevant content that enhances the user experience. Some examples of ad extensions are sitelinks, phone numbers, callouts, structured snippets, and in some cases, user ratings.

Optimize Landing Pages

Ensure your landing pages are relevant to the ad copy that got your users there in the first place. This will boost ad rank and quality score (your potential to rank higher while paying less for target keywords), increase website traffic, and ultimately improve conversion rates. Some simple ways to improve your landing pages is to include clear calls-to-action (CTA), implement responsive design for mobile users, optimize page speed, and quality content.

• Improve quality score to lower the total cost of ads showing up.
• Add extensions like sitelinks to highlight specific web pages, callouts to highlight specific features, call extensions for phone numbers, or even customized URLs to improve click-through rates (CTR).
• Implement remarketing to reinforce brand awareness and ensure your ads are staying top of mind as they continue browsing onto other apps or pages.

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