Chapter 1
Framing the Marketing Process
In This Chapter
Taking the necessary marketing steps that lead to sales
Getting your marketing program started
Understanding how small business marketing is different
You’re not alone if you opened this book looking for an answer to the question, “What is marketing, anyway?” Everyone seems to know that marketing is an essential ingredient for business success, but when it comes time to say exactly what it is, certainty disappears from the scene.
People aren’t sure if marketing, advertising, and sales are the same or different things. And they’re even less sure about what marketing involves and how to do it well.
To settle the matter right upfront, here’s a plain-language description of what marketing — and this book — is all about.
Marketing is the process through which you win and keep customers.
Marketing is the matchmaker between what your business is selling and what your customers are buying.
Marketing covers all the steps involved in tailoring your products, messages, online and off-line communications, distribution, customer service, and all other business actions to meet the desires of your most important business asset: your customer.
Marketing is a win-win partnership between your business and its market.
Marketing isn’t about talking
to your customers; it’s about talking
with them. Marketing relies on two-way communication between your business and your buyers.
Seeing the Big Picture
Marketing is a nonstop cycle. It begins with customer knowledge and goes around to customer service before it begins all over again. Along the way, it involves product development, pricing, packaging, distribution, advertising and promotion, and all the steps involved in making the sale and serving the customer well.
Following the marketing wheel of fortune
Every successful marketing program — whether for a billion-dollar business or a solo entrepreneur — follows the marketing cycle illustrated in Figure 1-1. The process is exactly the same whether yours is a start-up or an existing business, whether your budget is large or small, whether your market is local or global, and whether you sell through the Internet, via direct mail, or through a bricks-and-mortar location.
Just start at the top of the wheel and circle around clockwise in a never- ending process to win and keep customers and to build a strong business in the process.
Figure 1-1: The marketing wheel of fortune.
