Effective Visual Marketing for Your Organization

What is "visual marketing"? What does it do, and why in the world should you care? In a nutshell, visual marketing is simply that part of your marketing plan that involves visual media.

We’re a Visual Species

Vision is our primary human sense. At a very early age, we use pattern recognition to differentiate and learn the nature of everything around us. The words you’re reading right now are a prime example of our unique ability to recognize patterns.

Visual expression in our society defines, qualifies, and impacts every level of business, regardless of product, service, or message. Visual marketing comprises the various processes and techniques used to promote, sell, and distribute a product, service, or message to a targeted audience. Visual marketing permeates almost all consumer and marketing activities.

Brand Awareness

Brand category leaders are invariably the organizations who employ the best visual marketing. They present simple, memorable, appropriate, and consistent visual images across their communication channels. Think McDonald's or Coca-Cola--their visual cues immediately differentiate them from their competition. Focus on powerful visuals that speak to your target audience. Visual messaging, along with positive customer experiences, drive brand awareness, loyalty and repeat sales.

Identify Yourself

The visual marketing of your organization helps to build a brand identity in the mind of your audience. It begins with your overall corporate identity materials, those all-important visual cues that tell your audience who you are. It’s your logo, collateral materials, signage, sales tools, vehicles, uniforms--every point at which your identity meets the public’s eye. This is the front line of marketing, and all the more important to control because it's the way we see things--our perception of something--that creates our reality towards it. Your identity materials must create an image that is unique, appropriate, consistent, professional, and persuasive.

Design with Strategy

Beyond your organization's identity, visual marketing reaches into nearly every aspect of your communications plan. Advertisements, brochures, sales and informational DVDs, Web sites--the opportunities for enhancing your marketing activities through good visual planning and strategy are endless. No message exists in a vacuum; every message is delivered through a medium. That medium can be well controlled and intelligently utilized, or it can be poorly handled and become a wasted opportunity. Visual marketing applies intelligent planning to all communications media. More than simply design, it’s design that is supported by a cohesive strategy.

Organizations of every size and description can benefit from intelligent, well-managed visual marketing practices. Presenting yourself in an appropriate and professional way is the first step to ensuring that your message, your product, or your idea gets into the mind of your audience and inspires them to take action. After all, that’s what marketing is all about.

David B. Coleman is a visual communications specialist and founder of Imagine, an award-winning visual marketing firm in South Bend, Indiana. With 25 years in visual communications, he has provided consultation for such noteworthy clientele as the Cleveland Clinic, the Quaker Oats Company, NBC Sports, Bayer Corporation, the Odyssey Channel, and the University of Notre Dame. Imagine can be found at http://www.imaginevisualmarketing.com.

Making Your Place in the Market

Every company should be aware of their competition within the marketplace. The business world is one filled with non-stop competition and those who survive are going to be the ones who have a full understanding of their territory.

The problem a lot of businesses face is in how to approach their marketing. Many choose to ignore the competition altogether and instead emphasize only their products. While you want to focus on the quality of the products you provide, you have to be aware of exactly how to best approach doing so as well as who else is selling that same type of product.

If you happened to create a product nearly identical to another one already on the market you’ll need to explain to people why yours is better than the others. If you aren’t studying the competition you might not even be aware another product exists.

A lot of marketing can be boiled down to an effort to tell people why you are the best company for them to do business with. It is essential that you know who else is vying for their attention for you to come up with any adequate reasons you are the best. This is where a strong analysis of your competition can come into play.

What kind of marketing strategy works is an ever-evolving process. As time progresses the type of marketing strategies that work may not always be the same. If your competition happens to hit on that perfect strategy before you do, you need to be aware of what they’re doing and why it’s working.

Often a business will attempt to simply emulate whatever successful marketing strategies already exist. Doing this will inherently place you a step behind the competition. You need to pay attention to what they’re doing but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be considering way to improve upon it.

This extends to more than just the marketing strategy as well. The very way a business runs itself should be considered. There was a time when retail stores might’ve focused most of their marketing on showing their great service. Wal-Mart started an emphasis on low pricing with service taking a backseat in their marketing. When it comes to your marketing, you need to be aware of what kind of focus you should use in your marketing strategies.

Now the question is how to best put all this information to good use. Brochure printing is a very effective means of comparing your company with another. Because of the level of information you can place within a brochure, you can easily track all the key benefits of shopping with your company in relation to the competition.

Do a compare and contrast pamphlet explaining what makes your company better than all the others. Perhaps you want the emphasis to be more on the quality of your products. If this is your goal brochure printing is still effective at giving a potential customer all the information they’ll need.

The foolish company is the one who choose to ignore everyone else competing for the same customers. If you don’t know what everyone else is doing you won’t know how to do it better than them.

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7 Strategy Execution Themes That Will Keep Your Organization Moving in the Right Strategic Direction

According to a study by the Conference Board, marketplace strategy execution ranks high in the top ten issues that senior managers must face today. While many issues drive poor execution, they all appear to point to one major common factor: A lack of organizational preparedness to implement marketplace strategies as envisioned by those who conceived them. For example, consumer electronics retail store A advertises great selection and low prices. Its customers are unperturbed if they don't receive A+ service. Their expectation is low prices not world-class service.

Store B advertises, "No question is left unanswered." Customers entering this store expect great service. If sales associates are inattentive and customers receive no help when asking about a product then the expectation remains unfulfilled. This means customers will return for future purchases.

Companies that spend their time developing a strategy need to follow through for the long term. That's why in my new book, Strategy Activation: Keeping Promises to the Marketplace, I reveal the 8 points below that will drive your organization in the right strategic direction.

Top 7 Strategy Activation Themes to Think About When Creating & Following Through With Your Marketplace Strategies:

1.Understand that although a strategy may appear brilliant on paper, it is the implementation that is important. Failure to follow through can result when you allow your strategy to outstrip your organization's capabilities. It can also happen when your employees do not understand your marketplace strategy or their expected behavior or when your company does not support the strategy's delivery. You may also have conflicting success metrics and employee rewards. Find where the problem is and fix it immediately

2.Keep in mind that a promise, no matter what it entails, leads to customer expectations. Your strategy communicates intent. It's a promise made to the marketplace. This promise creates expectations for your products and services that must be met if customers are to walk away satisfied.

3. Remember to go beyond the promise and communicate how your organization will deliver on its marketplace promise. We live in skeptical times. These reasons-to-believe fine-tune expectations add assurance that the company will follow through on its promise. Plus, it will provide internal direction for resource allocation, product development efforts and system design.

4.Recognize it's the customer experience that differentiates one organization from another. The overall customer experience includes the sum total of all the little touch points your customers have with your organization. From the advertising messages to interaction with sales and customer service personnel to monthly billing statement your company's products, services, and experiences must all reinforce the image desired in the marketplace.

5.Align employees. Your employees drive customer experiences. Promises can only be fulfilled if your employees understand it, believe it and are compensated well for fulfilling their role

6.Create business processes that reinforce your envisioned marketplace strategy. Internal and external business processes must support your strategy implementation. They must be mapped and traced, noting each step's effect on the overall customer experience and the organization's ability to fulfill its promises.

7.Give employees the right tools that enable, their ability to be consistent with the desired marketplace image. These could be task tools to complete a task associated with a specific process step, information tools to provide critical information for accomplishing one's job or communication tools to ensure everyone is on the same page. The tools must enable delivery of the promise and customer expectations.

Understand that successful marketplace implementation is difficult. It requires forethought, planning, and a relentless focus on your marketplace promise. Strategy Activation is not an overnight fix, but a discipline that can help a company prepare for flawless marketplace implementation. The rewards of happy customers, energized employees, and a successful business are worth every ounce of effort demanded.

If you follow these 7 tips, and invest in my book, Strategy Activation: Keeping Promises to the Marketplace at strategyactivation.com, you will provide your organization with a head start in the right strategic direction.

Pioneering Marketing Strategist, Scott Glatstein, President of IMPERATIVES, LLC turns market opportunities into record-breaking profits with effective marketplace strategy execution. Now for the first time, with his new book, "Strategy Activation: How to Turn Your Vision Into Marketplace Success," Scott unveils his groundbreaking plan for higher strategic profits. Get your FREE SNEAK PREVIEW at: http://www.strategyactivation.com