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So you want to do marketing for your company. You've created a marketing plan and want to implement it. How do you determine which applications/vendors to use?

For example, for email marketing and online surveys, use Vertical Response or Constant Contact or Mail Chimp or iContact or SurveyMonkey or...

What about:
Social Media apps
Mobile marketing apps
SEO apps SEM/keyword apps Analytics tools and apps

The list goes on. Ask friends? Use forums with colleagues? Web search? Something else?

Greatly appreciate it.

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Thanks for comments. I probably didn't explain this well enough. I understand marketing pretty well. My question is for after you've got your marketing plan created (no matter what format it takes), how do you choose the tools/applications to implement it? So simple example - you need to do an online survey of your customers. There's Vertical Response, Survey Monkey and many, many more. How do you choose? – Chris Sep 27 '10 at 18:21

2 Answers

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So you want to do marketing for your company...

You're asking technology questions. I'm a marketer, and trust me, (a) there are plenty of good-enough tools out there for any and every activity you're going to call 'marketing,' (b) they're all the wrong place to start your thinking about marketing!

The start point is your customers/users. If you don't have any yet, post some additional comments to describe your situation and I'll suggest appropriate ways to get that initial base.

So let's assume you do have people getting value from what you do. Start talking to them 1-1. Ask if they're willing to spend 20 minutes talking to you. Block out half of every day for as long as it takes and get to know them. Find out what life's like from your customer's point of view. What are they loving? What frustrates them?

The bulk tools work best when you're using the learning from individual conversations and scaling the interaction up. Working (as most startups do) the other way round is expensive and destructive.

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To me the best way to do marketing on social-media is not by feeding them with content, but by engaging in conversations. Lets say, your product deals with 'weight loss' - you would find numerous people tweeting about this problem, to whom you can interact, gauge their response and see if your product could benefit them.

The above is just an example to use twitter for marketing which I have found to work well.

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