Simply put, situational marketing is a marketing campaign that is targeted around a person’s consumer’s needs and circumstances. These are the customers that react to certain situations and become repeat consumers. Let us say you are running a landscaping business. What are your customers interested in knowing? Are they interested in knowing how to landscape their lawn or are they more interested in knowing where the best deals are to be found?
Creating Marketing Plans
A good understanding of what your customer’s wants and needs are will help you to create a winning marketing plan and make your business more profitable. In this day and age, many marketers and advertisers use situational marketing strategies as a way to reach out to a wider audience. Using this strategy will ensure that you never have any complaints from your current clients. The majority of people don’t like getting bombarded by sales and advertisements. Marketers and advertisers who use this technique are able to avoid having to deal with angry customers.
Another advantage to using a situational marketing strategy is that you can easily measure the results of your advertisements. With the rise of social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, businesses now have access to a captive audience that can be targeted with advertising campaigns. Social media users are very familiar with these sites and would be surprised when they are sent a surprise advertisement. With the help of a website such as Facebook or a social media site such as Twitter, marketers can easily measure the response rate of any ad campaign and determine whether or not it was successful.
Adjusting Marketing Strategy To Be More Effective
Once marketers determine which ads were effective, they can make adjustments. Now if your lawn care business has five Facebook fans, you may want to change your television advertisement to a YouTube video. This is not only more likely to be noticed by YouTube viewers, but it is also more likely to become viral. In order for any viral marketing strategy to be effective, it needs to reach a large audience. Social media sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter can help you find these audiences. By adding the keywords “favors”, “most watched” and “most viewed videos” to your advertisement, you will be able to target a specific demographic.
The benefits of situational marketing do not just stop there. Marketers now have a new way to advertise to their customer base, which translates into more direct sales for their business. Using location-based marketing strategies such as coupons, consumers will be more likely to pass these coupons out in order to save money on their shopping. Coupons can also be delivered directly to the consumers where they are most likely to use them such as in grocery stores. The increased sales brought about by this technique will not only benefit the manufacturer, but will also benefit the business owner since they get paid commissions for every sale that comes in.
Geographic Marketing
Location-based marketing allows marketers to target customers who are within a certain area. With this type of strategy, marketers can easily gain access to the target audience through social media marketing campaigns and coupon publications. With this option, customers in certain areas will be targeted through advertising that uses location-based parameters. The ability to reach potential customers through social media marketing campaigns and coupons will give marketers a higher chance of making profit with their situational marketing campaign.
Summary
Social media gives marketers an edge over competitors by allowing them to make changes to their promotional efforts in real time. Marketers now have the chance to determine which promotional method works the best by comparing data collected through different resources such as demographics and focus groups. With this information, marketers can fine tune their social media strategy, and can see where their audience is most receptive to specific offers. Because changing your advertising efforts in real time is advantageous, most companies have already come to recognize the value in situational marketing.
