There is a huge amount of information on marketing available, there are over 150 million entries on the subject on Google for example.
Why is this? It’s pretty easy to understand really. There is an extremely large amount of money and time spent by businesses, universities, governments, foundations, organisations and individuals of every kind, on market research. Market tests, marketing in advertising, marketing in product development, in graphic design, in copywriting, in media, on the television, radio and on the Internet – all designed to find out how to do the single thing that marketing is supposed to do. Bring in a customer, to crack that code.
Yet despite that investment of resources and the abundant supply of marketing talent that exists out there in the world, there is a massive, unfulfilled and seemingly impossible need in business to get more customers. Is it really that marketing is as mysterious as everyone appears to be making it?
The truth is, as we see it, that marketing is – or at least the mechanics of it – is relatively easy. In this series of articles, we will provide you with the basics of what you need to do to market your products or services well.
To do this it will require some things from you and your business. It will need real focused discipline and desire. A desire to build your brand into a ‘world class’ proposition – yes, world class. A desire to build a unique proposition for your target customer that differentiates you from all of your competition. A strong will to get the customer to ‘come through the door’ initially and buy what you are offering and to get them to come back over and over again and buy again. A desire to get the customer to refer your business and your brand to others they know. To open the floodgates and to work things out in terms of what is happening and why these things are happening. Wanting to be much, much more than a contender or just somebody – wanting to be ‘the one’.
To achieve all this, every business needs someone to be their Marketing Leader. The person who is most passionately committed to growth, to building a brand, a franchise, no matter how small a business might be. What matters here is the franchise and the differentiation it represents in the marketplace because without this differentiation marketing is futile and a complete waste of time, resource and money.
What are the first questions that your marketing leader should be asking?
The first question is ‘’what is our franchise?’’ This being what you own, what you do, how you look, how you act and feel and perform the things that differentiate your company from everyone else. What is the defining sensory impact your company makes? These are the franchise questions that need to be answered.
The answer should be a concrete one and everyone in the company must understand this. You can see, touch, feel and quantify. It is an answer that all who are engaged with your company knows. This needs to be the case because if they don’t know this answer they will leave you for dead. Marketing is about the concrete customer, the concrete trading sector or marketplace, the concrete deliverable, the concrete promise, the concrete behaviour of your people and reality of what you do and who you are and what’s important to everyone who comes into contact with your company.
The more concrete this is, the better the franchise. The more concrete, the better the marketing leader has done her/his job.
This series will help you grasp all of this and will be invaluable. In our many years of working in SME’s we find that the majority are not marketing led companies. The manufacturing company is generally led by an engineer, an IT company is led by an IT specialist etc. This leaves a big hole and allows other competitors to ‘eat their lunch’. By becoming more marketing focused and by having strong marketing leadership much market share can be gained.
Stay with this series and you will see the process and the methodology that will deliver for you and drive your business forward.
- Starting Point – The Importance of the Marketing Leader and Taking a Look Around
- Your Most Suitable Customer – the Target Market
- Defining your Central Demographic Model
- Understanding How Your Customers Think and Make Decisions
- The Conscious and Unconscious Mind
- Attraction and Avoidance – Purchase Decision Making
- Psychographics and the Central Psychographic Model
- The Customers’ Minds
- The Purchase Decision Chain – Conclusion
- Positioning and Differentiating your Business
- Classification – Product, Commodity or Brand
- Your Relative Standing in the Market
- Key Psychographics of your Market
- Developing your Positioning Strategy
- Your Unique Selling Proposition