Marketing: Goals and Objectives?

Marketing plans can be such a complicated process, with so much detail that sometimes it seems convoluted. Some may wonder, is there really a reason for having marketing objectives? Yes. Yes there is. Marketing objectives advise you and those involved in your marketing plan on what the goals of the plan are. Are you trying to gain more customers? Do you want to increase online sales? What, exactly, are you trying to do?

Once you decide that you need a marketing plan, and before you figure out what your plan is, you need to determine what your goals are. Without goals, the plan is just something that is nice to do that might get your more customers. But, there isn’t a way to track if the plan is successful if you don’t know what your objectives for having the plan are. Plus, figuring out what the objectives are allows you to figure out at what point the marketing plan is successful.

In order to decide what your objectives are for the marketing plan, the first thing to do is to know what the mission and goals of the organization are. If you are a company that provides insurance to customers, your mission may be to provide the best customer service, and the goals are to increase the number of people you provide coverage for. In this case, your marketing objectives may be increase the number of new customers obtained online. Your marketing plan will include ways to increase those new customers, while still maintaining the best customer service available. On top of that, you can track how well your marketing plan is doing by the increase percentage of online sales over a set timeframe from when your marketing plan goes into place.

On top of all of this, the marketing plan, the objectives, the goals, everything must be within all ethical guidelines. What does this mean? It needs to be above all else without any implications of wrongdoing. Most companies are not going to have this issue. However, it is always something that needs to be thought about and reviewed throughout every piece of decision making. All pieces of the marketing plan must make sure that they are not harming anyone or offending any person or group. Sometimes it means making sure that the phrasing or colors are in line with the group you are advertising to. Sometimes it means advertising in different ways to different locations. Regardless, knowing what offends different groups will help to make sure your company is above all else when advertising and working your marketing plan.

After all of this, I can say good luck to you. Creating a marketing plan can be very difficult. It’s time consuming, detailed, and will hopefully work and get you more customers. But knowing what is best for your company the most important piece of all. You know your company best. You know what marketing is going to be the best and help you be the most successful.

Markets for Marketing

One of the most difficult things, after figuring out what you’re going to market, is determining who you are going to market that product or service to. Should it be used by males or females? Is there a certain geographic area that is most likely to use it? Is there an age group that may find it more for them than someone else? All of these things, and more, have to be figured out in order to know who you are going to market it to.

Asking questions is one of the biggest tools for figuring out your target market. When you ask questions, you can get answers which will either open up more questions, or bring about the target market. Target markets are often defined by geographic location, demographics of the customers, and the psychographics of the customers. So in order to determine each of the areas, there are some simple questions that can be asked for each of these areas:

• Is the product limited to a small area (locally), a medium sized area (city or state wide) or a large area (nationally)?
• Where are the customers located who are most likely to use the product?
• Is the product geared more towards men or women, or will both use it?
• What age group is most likely to purchase the product?
• Is there a certain type of person who will use the product?
• Does the ideal customer have any particular hobbies?
• Are there traits that the ideal customer has?

These are just a few of the questions that can be asked in order to determine who your target market it.

A second option would be to use tools available on the internet for helping to define the market. There are websites such as alexa.com, Google Insights, and quantcast.com that help a company to figure out who the target market should be for the new product. Websites such as these not only can help to define the market, but also provide insights in to how to best market the product to these groups.

Defining the market can be difficult, but there are so many tools available to help. The internet has brought about so much information, it is easy to see what other products have done right or wrong in order to provide the most information and make marketing your product as successful as the amount of work you put into it.

PC | the way to game

Gaming has almost always been on consoles for me in the past. I started with the original NES and had an original Gameboy (still have both of those). As I got older, I upgraded the Gameboy to the Gameboy advance, the Gameboy DS, and now the 3DXL. My NES became the Wii and now the Wii U. I also added a Playstation 2 and PS 3 to the mix. The times I used a PC was for The Sims and most recently for Skyrim.

The last year or so, my husband has wanted to build me a PC. He plays it, he streams it, and he calls it the PC Master Race. We had started to put the pieces together about 8 months ago, but lack of money stopped the build and we ended up selling most of the parts. Now, being slightly older and getting a job promotion, we can once again build the parts. That’s what this last week has been all about. Lots of discussions and a trip to Fry’s and Ikea later, most of my parts have been bought and the office has been redesigned. Currently, we are waiting on a specific CPU to come in stock and to buy a motherboard. Once those are done, everything for my build will have been purchased! We still need to get Mark a new mixer, and I will inherit his old one, but that can be a little bit down the road.

I’m super stoked about the whole thing! First off, we will get to stream together. Before, streaming together meant a couch stream. It’s fun, but very limiting on the games that we can play. I’ll also get my great room back. Although it has been nice having him out there when he plays games, it’ll be good to have a separate area for it.

Anyways, I’ll post pictures once the setup is complete. I’ll also post pictures once I finish nerding out the office with all our awesome stuff!

Where Do I Go From Here?

First off, I want to say that I started this blog for a class that I just finished last week. The first three blogs, although great and relevant, were done as part of my final project for the class. Therefore, they may not be exactly what I am doing or where I want this blog to go.

Which takes me to where I want this blog to go. With how much time I spend on school and work, right now I may not be able to update the blog a lot. However, I plan on doing at least a weekly blog posted at some point during the weekend. I’m going to switch it up on what’s posted. It may be about a game I’m playing, a site I saw and was interested in, what’s going on in life, or could be just a rant about some issue going on or about an argument or discussing Mark and I had. Most everything will be geeky and nerdy, as that is the core of who I am. But I just wanted to put this all out there and have a place I can just share.

This is just a short post to let you know the background and where I’m going, but I do want to give you a update on a few things that are going on. I’m currently playing through two Zelda games right now, Wind Waker HD on the Wii U and Oracle of Time on the 3DS. Both are fun and kind of similar. I got Mark to give me a price point for building my PC. I’m tired of sharing and want to have my own, since my laptop just can’t handle anything. I’m hoping to get a wish list up soon for all the parts. Once my PC is built, we will redo our game room with desks and both the PCs, as well as other nerdy and geeky items. I’ve already got those pieces figured out, just need to buy once the PC is done. After everything else is done, I’m hoping to get an entertainment center in our great room to hold the tv and game systems. Basically, lots of pieces to do and money to save, but hopefully will be done in the next couple of months.

Until then, happy gaming!

Also! NikonPunch is fundraising during his streams. If you can, donate here!

Twitch.tv | the place for games

Do you ever get to a point in the game where you are stuck and don’t know what to do? Or maybe you are looking at buying a game but want to see it played before you spend $60 on it? A couple of years ago, I was thinking both of those things. I was playing Skyrim and I wasn’t sure how to complete one of the puzzles. So, like most things nowadays, I googled it. After searching through the first few links, I came across twitch.tv. It took me to one of their streamers links that was playing Skyrim at the time. Now, it wasn’t quite what I was looking for, as he was much farther in the game than I was, but being able to watch him play the game gave me ideas.

Twitch.tv is a place for people to stream themselves playing video games. Similar to watching TV, different people are on at different times playing different games. The homepage has some of the most popular games and channels available to watch. It also gives the viewer the ability to search for a specific streamer or a specific game. If you like someone a lot, it even lets you follow them so you can be alerted to when they are online streaming. I follow a few people, and as soon as their stream starts, I get an email letting me know with the link to their channel. Twitch also has an app, so when I have the app installed on my phone, it sends a notification to my phone so I can go on and start watching their stream.

The best thing about Twitch is the chat. Not only can I watch someone play, I can talk with others who are watching the channel and ask questions or just talk about random things. On top of all that, the streamer will often watch the chat and respond to questions or talk with the viewers while they are playing. Some of the times I have streamed on my husband’s channel, I asked the chat for help when I couldn’t get past a situation. Like in Skyrim, I couldn’t remember the answer to one of the puzzles, so I asked, and people immediately gave me the answer.

Just like I mentioned before, you can also check out games before you buy them. When a game comes out on PC, Xbox, PS or Wii, most likely someone already has it and is playing it for others to see. My husband and I just did that with the Wii U. After watching some friends play Mario Kart 8 and seeing how awesome it was, we went out and bought it that day and started streaming it that night! We weren’t going to get a Wii U, as we had a Wii and didn’t really see the need to upgrade. But after watching and being convinced of Mario Kart’s awesomeness, we broke down and did it. And after watching some of the E3 videos of new games that will be coming out, it was well worth the purchase!

Now after trying to sell you on how awesome and life changing getting a Wii U is, you should definitely check out some of the streams available on Twitch. Who will be your favorite streamers?

Lootcrate.com | a geek’s monthly awesome

Every month I patiently wait for the one box I know will have awesome new items ready for me to geek out at. And it arrived this past week. Loot Crate. Loot Crate sends a monthly box full of very geeky and awesome items to share. It costs about twenty bucks, but a lot of times it is worth a lot more. The best part is that they get other geeks together to help make the box and pick out the items that they want for the month. Each month has a theme and the items somehow relate to that theme.

As soon as I got my tracking information, I no longer was patiently waiting. This month’s theme was “Adventure” focusing on Minecraft, Zelda and Adventure Time. Loot Crate will often give hints or say things that will give you an idea of what you are going to get. This month, they said there was going to be an exclusive shirt in the box. So waiting to know what it is can be exhausting.

The day came when my box arrived, small enough that it does fit in our mailbox, and at that point, I had to wait even longer. Why, you may ask? Because my husband is sponsored by them, and he has to open the box to an audience and record the unboxing of the items. Dah! Seriously, it is the most annoying thing ever! To me, it compares to Christmas, when your parents have put the Christmas gifts under the tree on Christmas Eve and tells you that you can’t open them until Christmas Day when everyone is over at the house ready to watch you. Really?! I wanted to growl at him, and maybe I did. I just wanted to know what was inside!

Finally, he was able to open it for his followers, then I got to be able to look inside. It really was a box full of awesome! The shirt was an amazingly well done Zelda shirt, there was a Zelda bottle opener key chain, a Minecraft object that can be hung up, an Adventure Time metal box with a figurine, a cd, some stickers and some temporary tattoos. Really, the first two were what I was waiting for.

All that being said, if you really like geeky things and have twenty bucks to spare, the Loot Crate boxes are so much fun. You do get more than what you pay for and you can cancel at any time. Yes, some things you might care less about, but it is so worth it!

The Life of a Gamer | how I became a part of this world

Like most people in their late 20’s, I grew up with the beginnings of video games and the Internet. From the time I can remember, I was playing “Math Blasters” and other various computer games, as well as “Super Mario Bros” and “Zelda” on Nintendo and Gameboy. Although I still play Mario and Zelda games, they are a lot different from what they used to be 20 years ago. More than all of that, video games have become much more social than they ever were before. Which is where I started to become immersed in a world that I never knew existed until recently.

About 3 years ago, my husband started posting videos on YouTube of himself playing video games. What?! Why would anyone want to watch someone else play a video game? Why wouldn’t they just play it for themselves? It made absolutely no sense to me. He was receiving quite a large number of views per video as well. Then came along twitch.tv. He would stream himself playing video games live, and people would watch and chat or comment along with him. Again I asked the question, why? So, deciding that it was best to see first hand what was going on and talking with these people, I started to watch his streams and chat with the other people watching his streams. It was very entertaining! Sometimes, the content being streamed wasn’t very interesting or good, but the conversations were almost always great.

Meeting new people, making friends all over the world, and playing games that were favorites or fun to play either by myself or with others made the experience that much better. Eventually, I started hijacking my husbands computer and streaming on his channel instead of him. While I don’t do this often, the ability to play a game and interact with others while I’m doing it makes the games more entertaining as well as much more social. I can’t imagine going back to video games the way they were 20 years ago. Then again, I love bringing out my original NES system and playing all the original games.

It is because of everything he does that I have new friendships and a new life that I didn’t dream of before. I’ve met gamers who do this full-time, like GassyMexican and lolRenaynay, and become friends with them. I get to go to PAX Prime in August, which is a convention mainly for video games. And I get to continue to play games when I can get away from work and school.

Life is awesome.