Marketing Is Out Of Date. What Should We Do?

The vast majority of enterprises will encounter such a problem: the rapid development of enterprises, but the marketing department has frequent problems.

What should I do?

The best solution is to upgrade the marketing system and keep pace with the development of enterprises.

In November 17, 2008, CCTV reported the illegal operation of Baidu's bidding ranking.

The storm soon spread to all kinds of print media and Internet, and immediately caused a chain reaction in the capital market. When Baidu opened its stock price a day later, it became 25.04%. Baidu.

Why does this happen?

Founded in 1999, Baidu developed rapidly after 2003, and its workforce grew from less than 200 in early 2004 to over 7000 in 2008.

In the early days of development, Baidu, like other enterprises in infancy, had the main task of selling, selling and reselling. It could even be considered that profit was the sole goal of Baidu at that time, and the bidding mode brought a lot of money and drawbacks to it.

But with the development of enterprises, the number of advertisers of Baidu has broken through 200 thousand rapidly, while its marketing still stays at the "low level" stage, which is centered on product sales, and has not risen to a new height of "customer centered".

Inappropriate marketing management soon brought a series of problems to Baidu.

First of all, advertisers' resource management is not in place. In fact, they can still advertise in Baidu when they pay money. There is not much difference between Baidu and Baidu in pursuit of profit.

With the development of Baidu, a large number of false Swindlers Company have become Baidu's advertisers and appear in the forefront of search web pages, which seriously damaged the user experience of search.

Secondly, Baidu did not take effective measures to manage the marketing process.

Some marketers block websites under pressure, or even blackmail and force advertisers to compete in the auction.

The lack of marketing staff has also caused advertisers' dissatisfaction.

An advertiser commented on Baidu: "those people under the mentality are too high. Either the director or the manager, I have to lead the team in person, never come to me for three months, and never come to me."

After the illegal operation was exposed, Baidu began to examine the qualification of customers in related industries and removed 1000 unlicensed keywords advertisers in two days.

Employees who assist in providing fake documents to be passed through Baidu internal audit are also dismissed. The company strengthens internal management and improves sales link monitoring.

After more than a year of marketing upgrading, in December 1, 2009, the "bidding ranking" storm ended with the full opening of Baidu's new advertising system, phoenix nest.

The troubles of the "Baidu"

In the background of China's strong economic growth, many enterprises, including Baidu, can be called growth enterprises.

And marketing is like the "shoes" of enterprises. With the development and growth of these growing enterprises, the marketing problems they are facing are also changing.

Just as human beings enter adolescence from infancy, enterprises will suddenly feel that "shoes are small". If they are not replaced in time, enterprises will not be able to continue to move forward quickly.

Then, what troubles will the shoe bring to the enterprise if it is too small?

In distress, the 1: company has the opportunity to contact the front-line marketers, understand the market trend and manage customer resources appropriately.

But after the rapid expansion of the company, the leadership and customers are getting farther and farther, and the sensitivity to the change of market demand is getting lower and lower.

Distress 2: the weakness of the marketing process is weak.

The company does not need to supervise the marketing process in the "product sales center", so long as the product is sold out, it achieves the purpose of the enterprise.

No matter white cat or black cat, it is a good cat that can catch mice.

But with the development of the company, the problems and feelings of customers are becoming more and more important in the marketing process. Without timely attention, the customer churn rate will be high.

In distress, 3: company can be a salesperson at a relatively small time, and the sales volume of customers is also small, so we encourage sales personnel to develop the market by themselves.

But when the company develops to a larger scale, with the continuous improvement of the company's reputation, the turnover of customers is also increasing.

At this point, if you do not rely on marketing team, relying on marketing personnel alone is very difficult to talk about customers.

In distress, 4: company has lower average turnover of salesmen, and the loyalty of backbone salesmen is higher. But when the company develops to a certain level, if the marketing individual's customers can not be successfully pformed into the customers of the whole marketing team, the marketing staff will often take away important customers once they leave.

In distress, 5:'s customers are allocated to a single marketing staff at a relatively small time, but when the company develops to a certain level, the resources of these areas are often controlled by the old marketers, and the new marketing personnel are unable to reach the old customers in these areas.

In this way, the marketing team of the company can not understand the consumption experience of these old customers in time and accurately, nor is it convenient for these old customers to provide other new services, and the development of the company is restricted.

Life cycle across the growth enterprise

The road of Patriot upgrading

In fact, the most valuable intangible assets in marketing management of enterprises are two main points: marketing process network and customer resources.

After entering adolescence, the scale, business objectives and human resources management of enterprises are very different from those of infant enterprises. If there is no corresponding system to manage the marketing process network and customer resources effectively, the marketing management problem will become the "time bomb" for the development of growing enterprises. Then how can we upgrade the marketing management according to the development of enterprises?

The Patriot case gives us a good lesson.

The patriot is the consumer electronics brand of Beijing Huaqi Information Technology Co., Ltd.

Beijing Huaqi Information Digital Technology Co., Ltd. was founded in 1993, and founded the Patriot brand in 1996. Its products include mobile storage, digital cameras, MP3, MP4 and other digital products.

The company's turnover has kept 60% growth for more than 10 consecutive years, and the number of employees has increased from several entrepreneurs to more than 1900 people now.

In addition to Beijing headquarters, Huaqi patriot currently has 17 platforms in the country, including more than 400 core agents and more than 3000 distributors, forming a nationwide product marketing network.

In the process of developing from scratch and from small to large, how did the patriot of Huaqi improve and improve its marketing management step by step?

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In the face of chaotic, conflicting, and lack of guidance marketing channels, Huaqi patriots have broken down their functions and positioning. Taking price and region as the main points, the three marketing elements of products, customers and channels are combined to design and adjust the original channel agent system.

After several marketing upgrading, the distribution structure of Huaqi Information core agent terminal seller has been formed.

In order to further encourage agents and sellers to actively explore the market, implement the company's price system and expand sales, Huaqi patriot has formulated a series of marketing regulations and strategies.

For example, we have formulated a better agent system and price control system, established agents and dealer incentive funds, and eliminated the disqualified agents.

In addition to the day-to-day supervision of the relevant employees, Huaqi Patriots will also hire regular consumers to buy patriot products from time to time. Once a violation of the price control system is found, they will take corresponding fines, deductions or even disqualify the agents.

Huaqi patriots also subdivided the customers according to the industry, and established a direct and close relationship with customers, providing targeted products and services.

During the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, the company made full use of the Patriot customer database and selected lucky lucky cheer members from old customers to form a patriotic Olympic cheer group. Through effective integration of customer resources, patriots gained the initiative in the market.

It not only provides a basis for the Patriots to formulate marketing strategies, but also becomes an important means for them to maintain the existing customer resources.

In the aspect of marketing team building, Huaqi patriot has a unique rule: from the cadres directly under the group, to the general manager of each department, and to every employee in the Department, every month must go to the mall for a period of time, not only for counters, but also for selling products.

In the process of selling products, they should listen to and understand customer needs and understand customers' suggestions for products and services.

The company's entry handbook also shows details that new employees must be familiar with (for example, training methods at the counter, and reporting the problems found at the counter by way of the daily report to the supervisor), and stipulates the training requirements in the system, requiring the supervisor to check the new employees, and combine the progress of the new employees directly with the supervisor's performance.

In addition, patriots often organize agents to participate in training and communication work, so that the agents' working methods, public image and business philosophy have been improved accordingly.

Marketing is out of date. What should we do?

From the marketing upgrading process of patriots and other enterprises, we can find that to solve the complex marketing problems of growth enterprises, we should start with the following aspects:

Marketing process network.

Not only should we set up a marketing channel system in different categories and regions, but also manage and monitor the sales process, shipment price and sales image of the marketing process, and constantly improve the network management mechanism of the marketing process.

In addition, growth enterprises should formulate detailed and effective development plans and actively expand new channel areas and customer relationships.

In the process of upgrading the network management of marketing process, we should gradually adjust the internal organizational structure of product marketing as a basic element to a new marketing organization structure based on customers (including agents) as the basic elements, narrow the distance between the business people and the market, enhance their sensitivity to the market and customers, and realize the integration and efficiency improvement of the network management resources in the marketing process.

Customer resources.

One of the reasons for the failure of the company's marketing strategy and the turnover of its sales staff is the lack of in-depth understanding and communication with customers.

Therefore, enterprises should first start with good customer relationship, collect customer information in detail, especially the information of key customers, establish customer files and classify management, and grasp customer needs in real time, so as to truly achieve the purpose of "controlling" customers.

In this way, the company can not only adjust the enterprise strategy and formulate targeted marketing strategies by analyzing the customer resources information, such as the geographical location, age, industry, income, and the size of the enterprise's customers, regions, industries, etc., but also firmly grasp the source of customers.

For customers, marketers must form standardized files for filing.

The standardization and pparency of customer resources should be as follows: any new salesperson can enter the work in a very short time only on the basis of archival materials.

This not only makes the pre sale, sale, after sale service completed by different teams, but also provides accurate, timely and reliable resources for the formulation of the company's marketing strategy.

Marketing team.

The degree of cooperation between the managers and marketing personnel (including agents) who are accustomed to the original management mode will directly affect the effect of marketing upgrading.

Therefore, growth enterprises should pay special attention to the construction of marketing teams.

First of all, we need to train the relevant personnel systematically, so that they can quickly grasp the upgraded system and management process, and grasp the new way of work through case study, action learning and so on.

In the early stage, a breakthrough can be made from one point. It takes months or even years to complete the marketing upgrade.

Secondly, it is necessary to strengthen the construction of reward and punishment system for marketing teams.

Establish a complete system of rewards and punishments for marketing teams, assess the situation in the process of marketing upgrading, and give material and spiritual rewards to excellent marketing personnel (including agents). For many training coaching, they still can not adapt to the relevant personnel of the new system. They should communicate in a timely manner, change positions and establish reasonable pfer procedures, so as to minimize the impact of marketing team changes on marketing work, and ultimately achieve orderly and efficient marketing upgrading.

In short, marketing upgrading can help growth enterprises break through the bottleneck of development and achieve rapid and sustainable development.

In the process of marketing upgrading of growing enterprises, if we can get support from IT information system, we can get twice the result with half the effort.