Appco Groups

PR or Public Relations is one of the vital keys to success in any endeavour.

For a business-house or entrepreneur, PR is nothing but the act of getting along with people who come in touch. Monitoring and evaluating public attitudes and then maintaining mutual relations based on these is what matters the most in effective PR strategy.

The PR department of any company or a good PRO should be in touch with people, the government, the media, shareholders etc and even share a good rapport with employees. It’s the PRO’s duty to maintain and ensure an internal cohesion in a company and also ensure there is clear communication at all levels, between the company and those outside and between the company and its employees too.

PR helps maintain and promote goodwill towards an organisation and at the same time it also helps influence behaviours. This is done by:

• Motivating new behaviour

• Neglecting and negating negative behaviour

• Reinforcing existing positive behaviour

• Doing extensive, planning, evaluation and keeping alive communication.

So here we go, with another post on Appco Group Marketing Tips...

In marketing, in any kind of marketing these days, it's absolutely important to have a database, a systematic and good one.

Creating a database is important, but it's through properly maintaining and using it that works, in any business. This is what helps acquire new customers and retain existing ones too.

It takes time to get ready a database. Careful and analytic study is required. Lots of things have to be included in a database, other than names, addresses and telephone numbers. These include-

• Customers' ordering pattern - the frequency of ordering for things and the way they make their orders.
• Their tastes and interests, as regards products and their benefits.
• Their socio-economic status, their hobbies, their way of life. This is important as it speaks about their needs and requirements.
• The peer group with which they interact and communicate; their friends, relatives and all such details.

It's the databases, carefully made and meticulously maintained, that help marketing companies make the most of their business endeavours.

To be noted:

• Databases are to be used with discretion; in accordance with laws and regulations.
• Databases are not just for big businesses, even small localised ones may needs them, but of course less elaborate ones.

This is what every clever marketer has to do, at the outset... find one's 'niche'.

Finding one's niche is one of the preliminaries in marketing; in marketing parlance we call it 'Niche Marketing', something that has been in vogue at all times and which has its own relevance, be it a big, well-organised business with wide networking or a small shop with limited reach.

A simple example illustrates what Niche Marketing is. If you plan to start a restaurant, what all would you take into account in the first place? You'd find a suitable place for it...you'll look for either a place where there's no restaurant at all or a place where there's no restaurant that markets a particular kind of food which you seek to sell. Or else you think of a restaurant first and then decide upon the kind of food based on what could sell or what could be in demand. Thus you are looking for a niche to place yourself and your business.

It's this that every marketer has to look for in the first place. It's then that all other things come up- customer acquisition, promotion, branding and brand-promotions etc. The launch-pad identified, you can go into other things and work towards bettering the scope of your business, but keep it in mind, finding the right niche does matter a lot...

(Julie heads our analytics wing and has more than ten years' experience in researching markets and market trends)