Vertimark is a full service, business-to-business marketing and advertising agency and communications strategy firm with vertical marketing perspectives. Our strengths include brand strategy, communications planning, corporate identity, direct and event marketing, internet and web marketing, as well as media and public relations to name a few.
Vertical marketing is the strategy of directing a company's sales efforts towards the specific markets or market segments that hold the greatest potential for success while deploying marketing resources to build and maintain market position and insulating customers from the effects of competitive messages.
Vertical marketing allows our clients to focus on reaching the right audience with the right message at the right time. It's about communicating with highly qualified, highly motivated customers and prospects -- when they're ready to buy. It's about providing our clients with the tools needed to generate opportunities to compete for business.
Like it or not, every company is held captive by its
philosophy. Good marketers though, turn the tables on their captors and
internalize the philosophy. When that happens, a marketer achieves the kind of
personality that builds brands.
Our eight principles or vertical marketing guidelines are
fundamental to our work. And, in some combination they run through every piece
of work we do -- from business-to-business strategies to advertising.
1.
Accountability
Vertical marketing requires that you define markets, set
boundaries, and determine goals. Once this occurs, as uniformly as possible,
you can compare marketing performance against these standards.
In the simplest terms, because a vertical marketing culture
embraces definition, you can more accurately and more frequently and more
confidently measure performance. Vertical marketing and the Verti-Mark brand
can't guarantee success but it can deliver repeatability.
2.
Financial Controls
Once you've committed to a vertical marketing model, you've
embraced the idea of marketing discipline. Marketing discipline drives the idea
of market definition.
The process of market definition isn't a one time event.
Instead market definition is a series of reformations -- each getting closer
and closer to the most precise mix of marketing events and strategies.
As that process unfolds, financial control is a natural
result. A vertical marketing approach allows you to keep a close eye on the
cost-effectiveness of each and every strategy -- each and every dollar spent.
You're spending more money on the marketing issues that have the most impact
and less money experimenting.
3.
Personnel Controls
While it's true that all employees are in some ways
responsible for the sales and success of the company -- it's also true that a
series of guideposts and checkpoints are necessary if a uniform message is to
be consistently delivered.
Among the sales staff, content uniformity (not delivery
method necessarily) is even more essential and the most valued conduit for
delivering information to the customer. The more finely-tuned the message and
the more it's in concert with the marketing strategy, the more successful each
will be.
Also, vertical marketing replaces sales management guesswork
with clearly defined goals. In an atmosphere like this, salespeople are more
willing to put forth greater effort, accept more responsibility, and exercise
more personal initiative.
4. Confrontation Selection
Put simply, confrontation selection means picking your
fights.
Every marketer faces confrontations every day with too few
resources to win them all. With vertical marketing as a guide, and Verti-Mark
as a strategist, we can together craft a vertical marketing strategy, or series
of tactics that address only the confrontations that are within the strategic
window.
You can't be everything to everyone. A disciplined vertical
marketer consistently competes where they are the strongest, and where they
have the best chance for success.
5.
Seamless Momentum
Are your advertising and marketing communications strategies
fragmented, or susceptible to frequent stops and starts? This approach
neutralizes the impact of a vertical marketing strategy.
To be seamless and consistent is to get more effect from the
same dollars spent. Sustainable momentum isn't possible when the communications
drivers are on non-complementary tracks.
6.
Strategy Definition
What's the game plan?
Little needs to be said. Strategy is central to success. A
defined strategy, widely and consistently communicated both internally and
externally, encourages increased individual and team performance.
Vertical marketing, and it's ability to clearly define the
process gives everyone involved the knowledge, the tools, and the confidence to
make a valuable contribution. Strategy also increases the chances to compete,
and compete effectively.
7.
Resource Concentration
Attempting to be most things to most people isn't consistent
with a vertical marketing strategy. That's not to say that success outside of a
traditionally defined vertical market shouldn't be exploited. It should.
In the industrial plant market for instance, a vertical
marketing strategy can be applied to specification functions, or geographic
market segments. But the laws of diminishing returns and economics of scale
don't go on hold.
Finding ways to target the essential specifiers, and then
spending the same resources to communicate more frequently and with more impact
to a more narrowly defined target group is only prudent.
Trolling is sometimes necessary, but it's seldom efficient.
In addition, this approach defies a central vertical marketing component --
concentration.
8. Communications Velocity
Communications velocity, the process of hitting the right
targets with the right message time and time again. It's natural. It's
unavoidable.
Communications velocity is most evident in the
communications tools a company brings to market in support of the sales force.
Communications occur faster and more precisely in the context of a vertical
marketing communicating plan. Thereby making more of each dollar work harder
and sooner.
Communications velocity is the catalyst for the program.
Only after a customer responds to the message in the marketplace will we know
if the message is the right one -- and by extension, because the message is a
piece of the overall strategy, the customers response allows us to amend the
strategy with confidence.
We won't be any good to our clients, and we wouldn't have
been any good to our past clients if we never had a point of view. From the
simply tactical to the clearly strategic, we have a point-of-view on nearly
everything.
We do a lot of research and accumulate a lot of marketing
experience and so we reserve the right to alter our point-of-view from
time-to-time. We encourage debate.
A brand identity can have significant benefits and add value
to a company's communications strategy. However, a successful brand can
continue to build awareness and retention, and impact the target audience once
the advertising and marketing strategy has run it's course.
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