SAMANTHA GROSS

With just minutes to go until deadline, the coders sit furiously typing, putting the finishing touches on their website. Brett Martin turns to his computer – the PowerPoint slides are almost done.

On the couch, a tiny dog buries his head into a blanket and shuts its eyes.

“Spanky’s the only one who got to sleep,” Martin says.

This group of nine entrepreneur hopefuls started less than two days ago with just an idea: an online planning and finance tool for small businesses called ProphetMargin. Now they have the website design, a business plan and a working database. And by the end of the evening, they’ll have a formal mentor and a meeting planned with investors.

Such is the pace of Startup Weekend, one of the final events of New York’s Internet Week, which is ending Monday. Participants in the 48-hour marathon came in alone with an idea and left with like-minded partners and a fledgling business.

“It’s a testament to how much people can get done when they’re working on something they’re really excited about,” Martin said Monday, reflecting on his team’s accomplishments over the weekend. “I met great people and had a great time and hopefully we’ll get some funding.”

ProphetMargin was one of 18 projects pitched Sunday night in the weekend’s final presentations. Other groups offered up plans for an app that would give users information about other people around them in public, a website to connect users with friends who need housesitters, an app allowing people to track the beers they drink, and an Internet platform to help adult entertainers build their brands.

The projects started as 60-second pitches Friday night. The 145 participants evaluated 57 suggestions and formed teams around the best ideas. Then they all got to work.

Usually, “you couldn’t create something like this without spending thousands of dollars,” Rob Steir marveled, looking around at his ProphetMargin teammates as they pushed through the final stretch. “We wouldn’t even know each other – we don’t know each other.”

Most teams gathered together people with varying specialties.

The group creating Data Dough – a service to help people sell their personal information to advertisers – included two software engineers, a graphic-design student, a computer-network manager, a Harvard Law School student, a new-media journalist and one person with a finance background.

In the end, the group’s work won it a prize – a mentorship from Noiz Ivy, an organization that supports entrepreneurs. Score.ly – a platform that would allow users to display verified personal and professional achievements – and ProphetMargin won the same prize. A group creating a platform to help publishers market-test novels won a free month of shared working space.

And a representative from AOL Ventures said the company would meet with three groups and fund one of them. The details of the deal were to be worked out later. The finalists were Score.ly, ProphetMargin and Deal Over Here – an app allowing people to buy unsold tickets just minutes before an event begins.

Even for the participants who leave with no prizes or investment prospects, the weekend can provide an opportunity to jump into a project full-throttle and test out potential partners for future endeavors, said Peter Chislett, a startup veteran who has provided mentoring to previous participants and who now helps run New Work City, a shared Manhattan workspace. Creating a startup can be an intimate experience that it’s better not to attempt with an utter stranger, he said.

“Your partners, they are your most important relationships for as long as you’re together,” he said. “You have to get along and you have to be able to trust them like they’re part of your family – without all that baggage.”

It’s a trial run that’s been shared by more than 500 teams at more than 100 startup weekends around the world over the last three years. Startup Weekend – itself a non-profit startup run by three directors and a handful of volunteer facilitators – has gathered would-be entrepreneurs in cities from Copenhagen to Istanbul. It’s funded by a combination of sponsorships and entry fees. Participants usually pay less than $100 each.

There’s no guaranteeing that any of the projects will live on beyond the weekend.

But Kyle Kelly, a wealth management product manager who joined a team launching a children’s language learning platform, said the experience gave him the opportunity to try on a number of different hats – and collaborate with others.

“The best ideas are generated not just by one person,” he said. “The best companies are formed with a team.”

—

Online:

http://www.startupweekend.org

Heavy Guerrilla Visual Communications Portfolio. While any well thought out business venture always starts with a business and marketing plan, they eventually delve in to marketing strategies that morph in to marketing tactics. Part of any great marketing plan includes visual communications to communicate the company or products marketing message.

Our portfolio of graphic design displays the end result of well planned visual imagery to communicate our clients’ goals to their target audience.

When creating a formal, written marketing plan, your marketing strategy will become the meat & potatoes from which you will generate new business without wasting precious capital.  Marketing strategy is the process that allows your organization to use its limited resources on the greatest opportunities to increase sales and achieve a sustainable competitive advantage. While marketing strategy should be centered on the key concept that customer satisfaction is the main goal.

Key to Your General Corporate Strategy

Marketing strategy is a method of focusing your company’s energies and resources on a course of action which will lead to sales growth and dominance of a targeted market niche. A marketing strategy combines product development, promotion, distribution, pricing, relationship management and other elements; identifies the firm’s marketing goals, and explains how they will be achieved, ideally within a given timeframe.

Marketing strategy determines your target market segments, positioning, marketing mix, and allocation of resources whether it be capital or human. It is most effective when it is an integral component of overall company strategy, defining how your organization will successfully engage customers, prospects, and competitors in your particular market.

Corporate business plan strategies, corporate missions, and corporate goals.  As your customer constitutes the source of your firms’ revenue, marketing strategy is closely linked with the entire sales process.

Below is some basic theory to chew on.

• Target Audience
• Proposition/Key Element
• Implementation
• Tactics and actions

A marketing strategy should serve as the foundation of a marketing plan. A marketing plan contains a set of specific actions required to successfully implement a marketing strategy and helps to paint a picture for which your target audience is, and how to communicate a message that they want to hear.

Here’s an example of a marketing strategy: “Use a low cost product to attract prospects. Once our company, via our low cost product, has established a relationship with prospect, our organization will begin to sell additional, higher-margin products and services that enhance the prospect’s interaction with the low-cost product or service.”  Walmart would be a great example of this strategy.  Once they get you in the door with “advertised loss leaders”, they then introduce to the consumer higher margin products.

A strategy consists of a well thought out series of tactics, i.e. advertising, public relations, and referrals to make a marketing plan effective and actually generate results. Marketing strategies serve as the fundamental foundation of marketing plans designed to fill market needs and reach marketing objectives. Plans and objectives are generally tested for measurable results in order to achieve overall goals.

A marketing strategy integrates an company’s marketing goals, policies, and action plans (tactics) into a comprehensive whole. Similarly, the various strands of the strategy, which might include advertising, channel marketing, internet marketing, promotion and public relations can be orchestrated.  Many companies flow a strategy throughout an organization, by creating strategy tactics (advertising, public relations, referrals) that then become strategy goals for the next level. Each level is expected to take that strategy goal and develop a set of tactics to achieve that goal. This is why it is very important to create each strategy goal measurable, utilizing a given set of metrics.

Types of Strategies

Marketing strategies may differ depending on the unique situation of the individual business. However there are a number of ways of categorizing some generic strategies. A brief description of the most common categorizing schemes is presented below:

Strategies based on market dominance – In this scheme, firms are classified based on their market share or dominance of an industry. Typically there are three types of market dominance strategies:

• Leader
• Challenger
• Follower
• Product differentiation
• Market segmentation

Innovation strategies – This deals with the firm’s rate of the new product development and business model innovation.  It asks whether the company is on the cutting edge of technology and business innovation.

There are three types of Innovation Strategies:

• Pioneers
• Close followers
• Late followers

Growth strategies – In this scheme we ask the question, “How should the firm grow?”.  There are a number of different ways of answering that question, but the most common gives four answers:

• Horizontal integration
• Vertical integration
• Diversification
• Intensification

Believe it or not, when it comes to Marketing Strategies we have not even scratched the surface but what we have mentioned are some basics that are most commonly used.  Most of our information was compiled from severals sources including Wikipedia from which you can find a plethora of “college textbook” marketing concepts.

While it is good to read and understand these fundamental concepts, at Heavy Guerrilla we feel that a more practical, easy-to-understand approach actually produces better results.

Marketing-Plan-Pro

Ask yourself these questions…

Do I have a “Written” marketing plan with associated Strategy?
Do I know what my “Ideal Prospect” looks like.

If you are not sure what the answer is to any one of the questions above, you need help.  The difference between companies that have formal, written marketing plans and ones that don’t are night-and-day!

The business owner that has a written marketing plan and strategy, complete with a tactical time line are the owner’s that are typically  ahead of the pack. They are the ones that customers seem to can’t get enough of. They are the companies that are usually smiling when the economy is down and haven’t laid off any employees.

A simple tool we use with our clients is a software package called Marketing Plan Pro.  Simple, easy, very cost effective and asks the tough questions you need to think about.  While Marketing Plan Pro helps you with your marketing planning, and strategy, there is nothing that replaces experience and the gut instinct to make sure you are on track.  It can cost a business hundreds of thousands of wasted capital if your marketing strategy doesn’t hit the target.

Invest now for the future.

That is not to say that you couldn’t use Advertising as part of your marketing strategy.

Let’s talk about what marketing is “supposed” to do and why most marketing doesn’t come close.  I’ll explain to you exactly why everything you know about marketing and advertising is mistaken.

What’s the difference between strategic and tactical marketing?  Well, strategic marketing has to do with “what” you say and “how” you say it.  It’s the content of your message and the positioning of your brand, company, business, or product.

The second part of your overall marketing plan has to do with your tactical marketing program, has to with the execution of that strategic marketing plan as far as generating leads, placing media, and implementing a follow-up system.  Tactics are based on the three legs of marketing tactics, Advertising, Public Relations and Referrals.

By creating a carefully crafted marketing plan, you will systematize the entire process so that your marketing program is easy to implement and so its always consistent in message.

The distinction between “strategic” and “tactical” marketing is enormous and one every business owner needs to be intensely aware of any time you are talking about marketing.  Most small business owners mistakenly assume anytime you talk about marketing that you’re automatically talking about tactical marketing; placing advertisements, generating leads, creating a web site, attending trade shows, designing a direct mail postcard, doesn’t matter what, this is all tactical talk!  The overwhelming majority of business owners fail to recognize and realize that the strategic side of the marketing plan; “what” you say in marketing and “how” you say it is practically always more significant than the marketing medium “where” you say it, or in other words, where you tactically deploy that marketing.

If you fail to make this difference, then you risk being fed-up towards some forms of marketing and advertising that should be a part of your tactical plan but that you’d be likely to eliminate because they haven’t worked for you in the past.

When marketing results are less than best, the inclination is almost always to blame the marketing medium; the tactical part of the plan-without any regard for how good or how bad the strategy behind that marketing piece was.

But just because it didn’t work, don’t assume that it won’t work.  Most people don’t have the evaluation tools and the know-how to judge whether a poor marketing result stems from poor strategy or the poor tactical execution.