Marketing is the process of interesting potential customers and clients in your products and/or services and persuading them to choose them over those of your competitors.
The key word in this marketing definition is "process". Marketing involves researching, promoting, selling, and distributing your products or services ( the four P ’ s of marketing — Product, Price, Promotion, and Place).
It's a huge topic, which is why there are tomes written on marketing, and why you can take a four-year marketing degree.
Whether you’re running a large corporation or a small business, marketing involves everything you do to get your potential customers and your product or service together.
The purpose of marketing is to drive sales. Good marketing can get potential customers through the door or onto the website and even put a product into a potential customer’s hands, but it’s not successful marketing until the customer has bought it.
6 Keys to Success for Small Business Marketing.
1. The first key to small business marketing success is knowing what you’re really selling. It's said that people don’t buy products or services —
they buy emotions and experiences. For instance, the Keg Steakhouse moves a lot of steaks, but look at their ads: What they’re really selling is good times with family and friends. Why did Michelin use a baby in a tire with the tagline “Because so much is riding on your tires” for years? Because Michelin is really selling safety, not just tires. And the baby in a tire campaign told people that one way they could feel like good parents was buying Michelin tires.
2. Once you figure out what you’re really selling, you’re ready to target your market . As a small business, you can’t afford blanket marketing; you need to get your marketing message directly to potential customers, not to everyone. Target marketing lets you zone in on those who have the highest likelihood of buying your product or service.
3. Know the difference between a marketing strategy and a marketing plan .
4. When you're putting together a marketing plan for your business, concentrate on the basics. These are the four key components of any marketing plan :
•Products and services: What goes into this section will vary depending on whether your company is creating an original product and developing it from ideation to prototype stage and onto market or marketing a product that’s already fully developed. Remember too that marketing a service is different than marketing a product. But whatever you’re selling, this section will focus on what is unique about your product or service and contain your Unique Selling Proposition .
•Pricing: The starting point for any pricing strategy is a breakeven analysis . After all, you want to make money, not lose it! But beyond that, the ideal price is a combination of how you want to position your product or service and what the market will bear. Learn more with this Guide to Pricing Strategy.
•Place (Distribution): The details of how and where your products and/or services are sold. As you’ll see when you look at the Sales and Distribution plan section of the marketing plan, this section outlines the distribution methods going to be used, the transaction process between your business and your customers, and your sales strategy.
•Promotion: The section of the marketing plan that describes how your company is going to present your products or services to the buying public. Your challenge here will be choosing the promotion activities best for reaching your target market but within your
marketing budget. The marketing tools section below will help.
5. Invest in market research . It’s market research that lets you learn which customers will be most interested in your products or services and gain specific information about them, learn about your competition and develop competitive strategies, keep abreast of economic trends and even find new markets.
6. Make sure your marketing campaigns are aligned with your marketing strategies and plans. For marketing success, you have to have consistent messaging. Integrated marketing will keep your marketing focused and
increase your sales .
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Credit: thebalance.com
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