Marketing Guru » Basics

Simple Way to Write Promotional Material

Marketing Guru — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 06:08:29 +0000

In almost all job positions you are required to write something positive about a product, idea, method, or a project. This is typically very challenging for most people. In such situations, a simple model called FABing is helpful in creating good promotional material in short time. Typically you will have only few seconds to convince the reader about how this project or product can solve their problems or get success.

It is essential to know about all the features, advantages, and benefits while writing any promotional material. But, it is important to know what are exactly Features, Advantages, and Benefits:
Features: The features describe about the components or characteristics of the product, project, or method that has to be promoted.
Advantages: Advantages indicate what the features can do. Advantages demonstrate how the feature can help the person. They are more persuasive than features.
Benefits: Benefits are most important aspect in FAB and plays a key role in promoting any idea or product or project. Benefits actually describe how the product or idea can meet the core requirements and solve the problems being faced by people.

A person knowing about the features can have advantage and reap benefits from it. Let us see how to use FAB to write promotional material.

Features: While listing down the features, it should be noted that they have to be clear, concise, and precise. Features should give clear picture to the readers about the characteristics of the product or idea or services offered by the company.

For example, a milk product may have features like 20% protein, pasteurized, high fat level, contains vitamin and mineral supplements etc.

Advantages: Advantages indicate what the features can do compared to other similar products or services. It is a slight progression in terms of information that features offer. Mentioning advantages in a clear manner will help readers perceive about project or idea easily. Advantages that are important for readers should be mentioned specifically as they grab the attention of readers/listeners. Mentioning about specific advantages about product or idea can give competitive advantage and makes the idea or product more appealing. Advantages provide information on superiority of the product compared to alternatives.

For example, the advantages of milk product can be that it meets recommended protein requirement, meets high energy requirements, easy to digest, rich protein and minerals source, no need to boil etc.

Benefits: The aim of mentioning benefits is to solve the problems, difficulties, and meet specific requirement of the reader. The benefits indicate how the features having particular advantage will help to address or solve problems and meet the needs of the reader. The benefits include points that indicate what the features mean for reader. Benefits immediately highlight the selling points that are of relevance to the readers. They give a personal touch to the reader. The customers mostly look for features that benefit them. More the benefits provided by the product; more are the chances of influencing the reader to approve the product or purchase it. The features and advantages take the product or services one step closer to purchase but it’s the benefits which actually sells the product or idea.

For Example, the benefits of the milk product might be that it helps in giving high performance, ensure good health of children, helps to develop immunity, no contamination etc.

The FAB statement simplifies the process of writing promotional material.

So whenever you have to create a promotional material, just relax! You now know how to handle it. List all the features of the product. Think how the product is advantageous (better) than others. Then finally figure out who are the people who will buy the product. Once you know that then explain the benefits of the product in solving a problem or fulfilling a desire. That’s it. It is that simple.

Differences Between Web Browsing and Research

Marketing Guru — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 04:36:42 +0000

Today Internet is one of the major sources of information. You can find information on almost any topic you desire on Internet. It is a huge database of useful information. It is a major repository of scholarly journals, news, books, magazines and other general information.

Two common user approaches for information access on the Internet are browsing and research. Though both are used to get the information they are very different. Specifically, the purpose, quality, time taken, strategies involved, and skill required to get the required information are very different for browsing and research.

Purpose and focus
Browsing through Internet is usually more for the purposes of entertainment and general interest. Browsing is for time pass. You stop when you get bored. Browsers work without any intent to get credible information. Browsers have tendency to get off track by the information presented on the Internet. With browsing you start somewhere and end at a totally different place. Where as, research is more for professional uses. Researchers are intent-driven and will be looking for some specific information by setting objectives. They define their objectives clearly. The objectives will be like bulls eye, which help them to stay focused on their goal.

Strategy
Browsing is generally unstructured form of searching for information. It involves navigation through information collection. It does not have any specific task to get the required information. Where as, research uses a series of queries to retrieve credible information from the Internet. Research follows a series of instructions to search, find and obtain the data.

Skill
Web research is not easy and requires considerable skills such as active mindset, vigorous hard work and patience, which are not necessary for browsing. Apart from these, a good knowledge of how the search engine works, different kinds of search operators and using the right keywords are very much essential to find and capture the relevant, latest and credible information. Search operators act as commands to the search engine to gain more specific outputs. The most commonly used search operators are the Boolean operators such as ‘AND’ ‘OR’ and ‘-‘ functions.

Time taken
Browsing doesn’t have any time limits. Due to its unstructured form, browsing the web may take more time or sometimes may not provide the desired information, even if it is readily available. Where as research is time bounded, where timelines are set clearly. Researchers usually work heads down and focus on what they are looking for, where to find the credible information and how to find the information. They know what is found till now and what exactly is to be found. They regularly narrow down their choices to get the desired information quickly.

Documentation
One of the main differences between the two is unlike net surfers, researchers save the data they have collected for further analysis. Later, when they are offline they analyze the collected data, draw the conclusions and document or present the information in simple terms, which is easy to understand.

Casually surfing for information on the Internet is not efficient in finding useful information. Where as research is more thorough and involves a lot of hard work and skill, for the same reasons, information will be of good quality.

Sales Vs. Marketing Vs. Advertising

Marketing Guru — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 06:49:50 +0000

Sales is called marketing in India – This is due to little or no awareness of what marketing is. Sales and marketing means the same thing to most people in India. You will notice that a majority of Indian companies call their sales persons as marketing professionals. Till recently, with protected markets and an economy controlled by licenses, the Indian market was a seller’s market. Companies were not required to do marketing.

Only off late, due to increased competition, customer awareness, and changing buyer preferences, companies have started realizing that increased production does not translate into higher sales. Since sales has been called as marketing in India, when a real position has been created it causes much confusion.

See what professionals do or don’t do in Sales, Marketing & Advertising Jobs.

Job Functions	Sales Professionals	Marketing Professionals	Advertising Professionals
Pursue prospects to buy a company’s products or services	Yes	No	No
Personal sales targets	Yes	No	No
Direct contact with customers /have personal sales targets	Yes	No	No
Find needs/wants of customers	No	Yes	No
Build new products by adding or changing product features	No	Yes	No
Have product or segment targets & estimates size of market	No	Yes	No
Create advertisement campaigns – radio/TV/print /web	No	Yes (coordinate)	Yes (create)
Execute promotion plan & perform profitability analysis	No	Yes (design)	Yes