Businesses are being started every day. No, there is a business being started every day somewhere. The chances of success for these businesses are very slim. Don’t get me wrong there are some great businesses in there and some will succeed but many will not. If you have great sales skills and experience you could start a business that can change the fortunes of some businesses. That business is an activation business and it is a really exciting business.

Activation

Activation sounds pretty much like the word suggests, it’s the act of bringing something to life. In this case, we are talking about bringing businesses or products to life. How does that work? Say a business launches today and has a target of attaining 1000 customers. They could look to get these customers through organic forms of referral and paid advertising for example. This may work, it may not. Activators are sales and marketing companies that use a combination of methods to get these businesses to their goals.

Brand

A brand is all identifying marks and signs through which a company expresses itself. For our purposes here a brand is an identity, a collection of all the information we know about a business. Brand activation is in simple words the task of getting people familiar with a brand.

Product

Product activation has to do with introducing a product to a market. So when a business launches a product and wants to get it out there into the world the product activator works to get the public aware of and interested in buying the product.

Methods

There are specific methods that are used in the activation business. Let’s take a look at them.

Commerce marketing

Commerce marketing is all about getting customers to uptake the product. So this involves the use of direct to customer, eCommerce and other customer-oriented methods to get the product in the hands of customers.

Experiential marketing

As the name suggests it’s all about marketing the product or brand through experiences. Gone are the days of “just buy” this. Marketers understand that customer experience is sometimes more important than the product at hand and experiential marketing is about taking advantage of experiences to activate products and brands.

Influencer marketing

Influencer marketing has grown but has been with us for a very long time. This involves using trusted individuals and peers to influence people towards a brand or product. A good activator knows how to use influencer marketing appropriately to activate.

Content marketing

The internet age has turned content marketing into something much bigger than it used to be. We live in what has been dubbed the attention economy and nothing gets attention like great content.

Promotion Marketing

Activators are also aware of the power of promotions in bringing a brand or product to the market. Promotions work very well in the right hands and great activators will use dynamic and innovative promotions to achieve the goals of their clients.

Relationship marketing

Finally activators also leverage relationships they have created to achieve client goals. This may include getting products and brands to distributors, store shelves and online marketplaces.

Staff and skills

You can see based on the multiple methods used that you will need a staff complement that brings together a cornucopia of skills. This is not to say you will need a large staff complement, you will certainly need a large skills to complement. You will need a negotiator, a recruiter, a marketer, a digital marketer, a direct sales expert and copywriting skills at the very least. You can outsource some of these of course but you will need them.

Pricing

Your pricing will depend on the arrangement and goal. If the arrangement is about getting customers to sign up or buy products then that is easy to measure and you can make an arrangement based on numbers. Awareness campaigns are more complicated than that and you can have hybrid pricing. Either there are two ways to get paid, that is a block fee for the entire campaign (which can be spread out over the life of the campaign in monthly payments) or getting paid as per some measurable metric. Due to the innovative use of intellectual property, you will likely use a combination of the two.

Being a business that helps businesses is a good place to be.