Hiam - Marketing For Dummies

Marketing For Dummies, 4th Edition

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Copyright 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey

Published simultaneously in Canada

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2013957976

ISBN 978-1-118-88080-7 (pbk); ISBN 978-1-118-88090-6 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-88065-4 (ebk)

Manufactured in the United States of America

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Chapter 1

In This Chapter

Succeeding by understanding your customers and yourself

Formulating a winning marketing strategy

Leveraging your marketing program with focus and control

Figuring out what to realistically expect from your program

Maximizing the appeal of your product, service, or business

Marketing is all the activities that contribute to building ongoing, profitable relationships with customers to grow your business. The traditional goal of marketing is to bring about healthy sales through advertising, brand development, and other activities. A more long-term goal is to become increasingly useful or valuable to a growing number of customers so as to ensure your future success. Watch both short-term sales and long-term development of value to make your organization a growing success.

Your marketing program is the right mix of products or services, pricing, promotions, branding, sales, and distribution that will produce immediate sales and also help you grow over time. Youll know when youve found the right mix for you and your organization because it will produce profitable sales and enough demand to allow you to grow at a comfortable rate.

This chapter serves as a jumping-off point into the world of marketing. By reading it, you can begin to design a marketing program that works for you. The rest of this book can help you refine the program that meets your needs.

To make your marketing program more profitable and growth oriented, think about how to reach and persuade more of the right customers. When you understand how your customers think and what they like, you may find better ways to make more sales. The next sections help you get better acquainted with what you have to offer and start communicating those offerings to your customers.

Traditional marketers ask just one key question:

What do we need to tell customers to make the sale?

Then they flood the environments (both virtual and actual) with competing claims, trying to outdo each other in their efforts to prove that they have what customers want. This barrage of noisy advertising and one-up salesmanship is inefficient, wasteful, and, to many, an unfortunate source of social pollution.

A better initial question to ask is this:

What do I/we have uniquely to offer?

When you start right off by examining yourself in the mirror and identifying your genuine, honest-to-yourself strength(s), youre many laps ahead of most marketers, whether youre selling something as simple as your rsum, as complex as a new high-tech product, or anything in between. Your unique strengths form the core of your offering, and you should keep building your strengths in ways that are true to your identity.

Whether youre marketing yourself (perhaps youre a consultant or someone else who offers individualized services) or a business entity of some kind, you cant make consistent and efficient headway by deceiving yourself and trying to deceive others. The more true to your core the marketing message is, the more effective it is. If you cant find any unique qualities to advertise, postpone those media purchases and work on self-improvement or product development. (Perhaps you simply need to listen harder to what your customers say and make sure theyre so happy that they recruit new customers!) Then come back to your program with a stronger set of claims that any customer can clearly see are of benefit that is, unique benefit, not just a run-of-the-mill, everybody-does-it-that-way benefit.

If you draw a large enough circle around your market, youll probably encompass competitors who are better than you. There are so many people out there, working hard and innovating, just like you! So as you work to improve your offerings and become ever more unique and special, draw that circle appropriately. Its the equivalent of your bar, so dont set it too high. Perhaps you should try to be the best distributor of alternative, organic, and local foods in just one city. After you have that city sewed up, expand to the next closest market. Dont, however, try to advertise and distribute across a ten-state area right out of the starting blocks. Knowing yourself means knowing your limitations as well as your strengths.