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Marketing - Promoting for success Marketing essentials Put simply, marketing includes any activity that lets potential customers know about your product or service, what makes it special or better than others in the marketplace, and (ideally) encourages them to buy it. Marketing includes all forms of advertising and sales, but it means much more for many businesses. Businesses can survive for some time with poor record keeping, insufficient finance or a lack of management skills, but they won't last without a market. You may have the best service available, but what if no one wants to buy it? A strong market for your service may exist but what if nobody knows about it or how surprisingly affordable it is? What if everyone thinks your product is the same as all the others on the market? Something must be done to make the phone ring - and that is marketing! Businesses of any size should include marketing, however simple, as a core part of their day-to-day activities. Getting started As a small business owner wanting to market a product or service, you need to have a marketing strategy. A good strategy should define your market, outline the benefits that your product or service offers that market, establish how you will reach that market and set out a budget to achieve your goals. But what exactly is marketing? Marketing means different things to different people. A marketing manager will talk about distribution lines, market segmentation and product life cycles. An electrician will advertise in the local paper, put signs on the utensils and get t-shirts printed with the name of the business on the back. Then you have the accountants who sponsor the local soccer team with their business name on the jerseys so that mums and dads on the sidelines might think about the company at tax return time. And guess what? This is all marketing! How does marketing work? Marketing supports sales and product development in a range of ways. It's based on the ability to identify, attract and satisfy customers. Of course, this all needs to be done at a price that represents value to the customer and profit to your business. So the costs of marketing must be included into the budget and pricing. Not all elements of marketing will threaten your budget - some are business basics that are free or very affordable essentials that you will do in the course of business anyway, e.g. have your logo and company name on all stationery and quote slips. The good thing about marketing is that you can choose which elements work best for the product and service, as well as fitting your budget. The aim of marketing is to have the right product or service:
Knowing & identifying your market One of the most important factors in marketing is to know your market - this means knowing the customers you have as well as the customers you don't have. If you know your market you will have the added advantage of being able to change your product or service according to your customers' actual wants and needs. Business owners with great ideas often convince themselves that they have a market - and they might be right. They decide on what they are going to offer, start the business and wait for the customers to roll in. They see their customers as a crowd of people out there somewhere, just waiting for this product or service. Highlight The real fact is that many businesses do not do enough research and never really know who their customers are. Because many small business owners have not thoroughly identified or segmented their market, they make the mistake of trying to reach the whole market at once, often with little success. These are often the businesses that also find themselves in difficulty because they don't have a suitable marketing strategy to pull them through. More on Marketing click on the topics below
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