Strengthen businesses performance through planned marketing

                   What exactly is marketing and how can you apply it to great effect?

Imagine you have a product for which there is a demand — that is, you are able to sell it to the right person at the right price. In essence, it’s a voluntary exchange from both the buyer’s and the seller’s point of view.

How does marketing differ from selling?

Imagine you have a couple of hundred items for which there may not necessarily be a demand and, more importantly, you may not have identified a target market that is willing and able to buy that product. With marketing, on the other hand, you’ve actually investigated the market and found out what it needs before you’ve developed the product,

Unless it’s the first product of its type, people will already be using it. So, to some extent, their needs are already being met. But what about their unmet needs. The opportunity lies not just in fulfilling the met portion of their needs, but more importantly, the unmet portion of their needs. Therefore, marketing is really about recognising and creating demand, and anticipating demand in advance. However, many businesses try to force a transaction where no desire currently exists.

It is true that many businesses survive in spite of themselves. Perhaps they had a good product offering or were fortunate in not attracting a lot of competition initially. But markets have globally become more sophisticated and competitive, and consumers have become more sophisticated and knowledgeable, particularly with the growth of the internet. A common refrain, particularly from small businesses, is: ‘Our profitability has been going down for two or three years, but as far as we know we’re not doing anything differently.’

Essentially these businesses need to realise that they need to adopt a marketing focus to help ensure their survival. 

 The four key elements to marketing

The marketing plan (or the marketing planning process) will ask you four questions.

Where are you now?

This question will force you to look at your business internally as well as the external market that your business operates in, and take a snapshot of where it’s at today.

Where do you want to be in the future?

Where do you see yourself in the next one to five years? This question will force you to set objectives. It is incredible how many businesses fail to set robust objectives, for to operate any business without them is analogous to sailing a ship without a reliable compass.

How do you get to where we want to go?

This question forces you to look at the strategies, and the tactics behind those strategies, that will allow you to get there with minimal cost and effort.

Control or feedback function

This step, largely not performed by smaller businesses, is where you ask the questions: ‘Where did we end up last year? Is it where we should have been? Why did it happen? Do we need to change things? If so, how do we need to change things?

A marketing plan will give you that necessary structure that will allow you to understand these four key areas.

What about the costs?

Most people in small-to-medium enterprises don’t have a lot of money for marketing or promotion. But when you work for a big company you’re in the fortunate position of having potentially millions of dollars in what is called ‘departmental promotional expenses’ (DPE), which is the amount of money you have every year to stimulate the growth of that product. Fortunately, the above four processes can be used to formulate the necessary planning for a small-to-medium business.

Importance of knowledge

You’ve got to get the knowledge and apply it. You also need to set yourself timelines, such as for completing an analysis of the market you’re in. From this starting point, you to find out what the trends are, the key drivers and capture it all in a SWOT analysis, so that you know what the opportunities and threats will be over the next 12 to 18 months. You can then match up those opportunities and threats to the strengths and the weaknesses of your business. If you’ve got that down on paper, you will be in a position to make some rational, measured and, hopefully, strategic decisions.

Don’t promote your product to everybody

Perhaps the single biggest mistake made by smaller businesses is to promote their products to everybody. You need to find your target customer and know exactly what do they want. Get a sheet of paper and literally close your eyes, and profile the customer. Think about how they dress, what they do socially, the type of car they drive, their buying behaviours, the TV shows they like and so on. And be decisive about who you’re targeting the product to.

Ultimately, you need to understand the unmet needs of customers — and if you do that you’ll find that you’re targeting a smaller number of people who are more passionate about what you’re doing, and they will be more willing and deal with you. This type of singular customer focus is one of the keys to successful marketing.

The biggest change in marketing today

The availability of information is at unprecedented levels —and we have to accept that our customers are well armed with information. You need to have greater insights into what customers want and what they don’t want; your packaging of their needs has to be correct with regard to price, the specific blend of goods and services that go into that product, the promotional blend, the language of promotion, the distribution, and all other elements also need to support the customer and their unmet needs.