Niche Marketing Plans
Marketing a Career and Vocational Counseling Business
At Gaebler, we've seen what great marketing can do for a small business. But if you own a career and vocational counseling business, exceptional marketing may well be the determining factor in your long-term survival and success.
We recognize that the best career and vocational counseling business entrepreneurs tend to possess solid marketing skills. But what does it take to become a skilled marketer in this market sector?
Customer loyalty isn't what it used to be. Cash is king in today's marketplace, so your marketing plan needs to focus on value messages.
Technological Expertise
The field of marketing has embraced the digital age with enthusiasm and vigor. Although that doesn't make the marketing fundamentals that applied twenty years ago invalid, many marketing principles are being reinterpreted through the lens of today's technology. One of the things that needs to be considered by career and vocational counseling businesses is the need to increasingly incorporate technological marketing solutions into the marketing mix. In addition to marketing professionals, many businesses now include IT units as valued partners in their strategic marketing efforts.
Media Monitoring
Some marketing initiatives lend themselves to simple measurement while others are more challenging. For example, if you buy a mailing list and conduct a direct mail campaign, you should have little difficulty measuring the campaign's effectiveness and ROI. But how do you go about measuring your brand's marketing footprint in geographic and demographic sectors? To gauge brand reputation and presence, many career and vocational counseling businesses turn to media monitoring. Even more importantly, media monitoring can alert you to negative commentary early, giving you the opportunity to counter negative mentions with more accurate and more positive messaging.
Social Media Monitoring
Brand advocacy is a buzzword in marketing circles. What does it mean? Using consumer-oriented platforms to encourage customers to create user-generated content about your products and company, typically through social media. Even though the potential for social media to generate positive conversations about your product is good, the potential for it to create negative, online word-of-mouth is a concern that must be taken seriously. All career and vocational counseling businesses are especially vulnerable to negative exposure through social media. If your brand is taking a hit from negative mentions, it's important to generate enough positive content to push negative mentions down in search rankings. The more positive mentions that exist, the more difficult it is for negative comments (generated through social media) to gain traction on search engines like Google and Yahoo.
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