Battle for the Market

Let me start by assuming that everyone reading this marketing article has played the game Battle Ship at one point or another. When we venture into the field of marketing that is exactly what it’s like. Before you can steadily market your company you have to first go through the trial and error phase (The Battle Ship Game). This phase is just like Battle Ship, it’s you versus the Market.

STEP ONE – The Battle of the Beginning
To start your battle / game against the market you must first establish your ships / or in our case OUR market. your market can consist of several items such as social media outlets (Facebook, Twitter, etc.), locations services (Google Maps, Apple Maps, etc.), websites, web articles (Take this article for an example), Web and Mobile ad’s (Google ad’s, Bing ad’s, etc.), and many more. The more ships / your market you have the more the other player has to place as well.

STEP TWO – The Battle of the Target
The Battle of the Target is the battle of discovering your target audience. Once you have all of your ships / your market set up you must then begin the battle (The Trial and Error Stage). Once you’re setup you must start the firing. (Understand when I say firing I am referring to launching your trials). You must begin to see what’s a HIT and what isn’t. For example, a banking company may try over twitter down free check book ad… (Waits to see what happens) Darn they missed the target audience that time maybe they should just give up… NO would you give up in the middle of the game because they the other person has blown up a ship / your market idea? No. I didn’t think so, you would try again! Let’s say, for example. this time, they tried… Over Facebook down 30 day’s money back guaranty for all new customer. HIT you hit their market / target audience… You have their attention now, and now that you have it let’s move on to step three and make sure we keep it. Just because we are moving on in this article does not mean to move on when you get one HIT in your campaign. Keep going and simply move on to step three with each HIT that you make.

STEP THREE – The Battle of Analytics
Have you ever received a huge paycheck and then had to pay bills right after? Yeah, that is exactly what we are trying to prevent from happening because let’s be honest… who wants to give their hard-earned money away? Yeah, that’s right NO ONE. So let’s figure out how to keep these prospects and turn them into leads. We call step three The Battle of Analytics because you are now gathering the data from your HITs from STEP TWO and analyzing them so that you can tell what works such as 1) What market your leads were most responsive to.  2) When your leads are most interactive.  3) Why your leads like you. We call this the WWW or the WhatWhenWhy because this is the format for the problem that you have to solve to keep your prospects. While you may find that not all of your prospects will turn into a lead right away, I have personally watched prospects follow companies socially for weeks, months and even years. Keep your prospects interested and you will end up with a lead.

As you can see there is no reason that you can’t do it on your own however, there are a lot of reasons that someone like yourself might want to hire a company like Crusade Marketing to do this job for you. As you have probably seen in some of our other articles… To market, you must first decide what is worth your time and what is worth your money. It may not be worth your time to spend 14 hours a day working on your own to figure this out, but it might be worth you spending some money to have someone else grow your company while you make sure that you are building the relationships with the clients that you already have.

Important Advisory –
Do not attempt to perform the previous without 1) Authorization from your Owner, CEO, Founder, Marketing officer, etc. (Preforming this without proper authority could lead to a demotion, pay decrease, unemployment or a promotion.) 2) If you don’t think that you will have time to maintain these ships / your market then don’t begin to set them up. While I think that it is incredibly important for companies to have these setups I think it is even more important to keep them up to date and if you don’t have time to ensure that they will be updated and maintained, then don’t set them up, to begin with.