Just the Facts – the key Mindset for the Green Marketing Professional

We marketing professionals  love big creative ideas based largely on instinct and passion. We often believe that  determination, optimism and hard work will triumph on their own, but forgot that they should complement and not replace a thorough research, analaysis and planning.

We go through a step by step process to evaluate the idea, decide whether it’s worth it, and then refine it to boost our chances of success. We have developed a marketing strategy based on rigorous research so I recommend you go through the following process too. I’ll use the example of a new marketing campaign for a solar system for residential customers in California.

1. Define Your Target Market

First,  define your specific target market. What are the demographic and psychographic characteristics of your ideal customer? What problems do they want to solve? Where are potential customers more likely to live?

2. Identify the keywords your target market?

What are the keywords that your potential customers are looking for in your market? You can look at your competitors and check what keywords they are using. Just use one of the keyword tools free on my resources page. I recommend selecting around 5 keywords. One of them should be a general keyword such as “solar panels” and other “long tail” keywords like “San Diego solar energy”

3. Determine if there is a market for your product?

It’s a robust market  if there is a reasonably high volume of monthly local searches on Google for your keywords, but not too high as that will make it very competitive. For most companies a volume of between 1,000 and 2,000 is ideal. Use the free tool from Google for this analysis. Then do a search for the keyword and see if there are  Google ads, which shows that their are competitors that are selling similar products and that people are buying the product online.

4. Market Test

Ultimately, the best research comes from testing the market before making a big  investment. You can create a limited ad campaign and measure and evaluate the results. I recommend that you set up 3 or 4 landing pages on your website. These pages are designed to get e-mail addresses and then put a different message on each. You can test different  ads for different keywords and different target markets to see if the campaign attracts interest, and which particular combination of messaging and keywords works better.

If you go through this four-step process I am sure you will improve your results, as you have developed a marketing strategy based on facts and your instincts.

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