Blitz Marketing: From zero to infinity in a matter of hours

Before the advent of mass media formats such as television and radio blitz marketing was virtually impossible. Even then it was limited, but now with the internet it is not only possible but more often than not used even if the person doing it doesn’t realize they are doing it.

What is blitz marketing?

Simply defined blitz marketing is a strategy that takes a virtually unknown product, or brand and puts it out in front of as many targeted people as possible in the shortest amount of time possible.

How does it work?

Despite what it may seem this is not strictly a numbers game. Spamming will get you virtually zero return on your investment and efforts. The key to a successful blitz marketing campaign lies in the targeting of your audience. In fact that is the single most important piece of the puzzle, because no matter how many people see your product if they aren’t in the market for it you won’t sell it.

How do I know who to market it too?

First figure out why you’ve made the product. That alone will tell you a great deal about who you should be targeting. For example if you’ve made a new sports energy drink your primary market would be high school athletes and their parents. You wouldn’t be trying to market it in a nursing home. There are some basic questions you should be able to answer about your product:

• What age range will this appeal too?
• What gender is most likely to use this product?
• Who are my peers and contemporaries?
• What will this product do that no others does?
• How original is my product?
• How available am I willing to make my product?

How can I find people to market it too?

Rarely is the concern that no one wants a product. More often than not the problem is finding the right people to introduce your product too. A few years ago Heinz Ketchup released a variety of different colored ketchup some purple, some green, and if my memory serves there was blue and another color or two. I’ll get to the point right away and say it was a dismal marketing failure. Why? Because they didn’t target it at anyone in particular. Kids and pre-teens would have been the perfect market for this colored ketchup, but Heinz didn’t do that. And let’s just be honest with one another there’s something very wrong about dipping your fries (or chips for some of you folks) into a blob of purple ketchup. It tastes the same, it smells the same, it is exactly the same except the food dye added to it.

The moral to the story is don’t be a “heinz” spend some time finding out where you are going to market your product. In fact that should be the single biggest piece of the project. The key is knowing where to market not how hard you market or how much you spend. Leveraging available avenues like Google Adwords, Myspace, Facebook, and a product related blog you should be able to do a huge marketing campaign at a very minimal cost.

How much money should I spend?

The short answer is no more than you have too. The longer answer is no more than you have too. Unless you’re a huge corporate giant with deep, deep, deep pockets you no doubt have a very puny marketing budget. In fact you may very well not have one at all. If that is the case you can eliminate the Adwords marketing I mentioned above and still have three very powerful, viable, and free marketing tools at your disposal.

Myspace and Facebook are both free to signup and post content. You can build networks of hundreds of thousands of people using those two sites alone. You can get a free blog at Blogger (by Google), or Wordpress. A word of caution for whatever reason many people are distrustful of freely hosted blog services. If you have a website already (which you certainly should) consider hosting your blog with the site. If you don’t have a website go spend the $10.00 to register the domain name and the 4.95 per month for Host Gator and use a blog instead of a website.

What about email marketing?

By all means use it. Strictly as an opt-in method of marketing. Opt-in marketing is also known as permission based marketing. No doubt you’ve seen websites which have something that says “For the latest news and information on our widgets enter your email address here!” By entering your email address you are opting to have those widgets marketed too you. So if you’d like to use email marketing do so with an opt-in list. First and foremost it is bad business practice to spam people, and secondly it is illegal in many nations.

What if I try these methods and nothing works?

That’s an easy question to answer.

• Your product is garbage, or
• You didn’t target your market, or
• You got in at the wrong time

Those are really the only three reasons for a well defined blitz marketing campaign to fail. All of which can be fixed with some focused effort.

If you have a product you wanted to blitz market how would you go about it?