Chapter 1
Making the Most of Your Marketing
In This Chapter
Focusing your marketing by understanding your customers
Clarifying what your marketing is trying to achieve
Leveraging your marketing with focus and control
Identifying your customer touchpoints
Maximising the appeal of your product, service or business
Even though youâre reading Chapter 1 of a book called Marketing For Dummies, youâre probably already âdoingâ quite a bit of marketing, maybe without even knowing it. If you have a product or service thatâs selling, know who your best customers are and what they want, and have plans to develop new products for them or to find more customers, then youâre already addressing some of the fundamentals of marketing. Many companies, and even some of the biggest ones, mistake marketing for advertising. But promotion is just one aspect of marketing; many of the other elements that go into doing good marketing are things that you may think of as essential and everyday parts of doing business, such as setting prices and getting your product into the hands of your customers.
You may be good at doing some or all of these things, but unless youâre co-ordinating all of these activities under a formal marketing framework, your efforts arenât nearly as efficient or effective as they could be. Your marketing activity (by which we mean everything about your business that makes a difference to your customers) is crucial because itâs what gets your business from where it is now to where you want it to be. In this chapter, we go over lots of simple, quick steps you can take to make progress with your marketing activities.
Your Marketing Strategy: A Map to Success
Any marketing you do needs to be based on a
marketing strategy,
which
is the big-picture idea driving your success. In order to make your marketing strategy happen, you need to work out how youâre going to achieve it, which involves writing up a
marketing plan.
We like to use a simple analogy to stress the importance of doing all this in a co-ordinated way, which involves a destination, a starting point and a map. Your marketing strategy is your destination â where you want to be by a certain time. Your marketing plan is your map, which tells you where you are now, and sets the best course to get to your destination. This analogy is effective because it demonstrates the importance of getting everything working together. You can have a destination and try to feel your way to it, but youâll get there quicker and more efficiently if you know where youâre starting from, what the most direct route is and what obstacles lie in your way. Our map analogy has a final part: you can plan the most perfect route to your destination, but unless you start putting one foot in front of the other youâll never get there!
Knowing Your Customer
Many definitions of marketing have been created by experts with too much time on their hands. The Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM), the international body for marketing and business development, defines marketing as âthe management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitablyâ. Wow. We prefer our own, simpler version â âselling more stuff to more peopleâ. Weâre being a little unfair to the wordier version, because it does reflect one of the more important changes in modern marketing. You donât get very far in business these days by just making stuff and then finding people to buy it. Instead, youâve got to find out what customers want from you and then create a product to meet those needs. This view is the difference between being what the experts call product-orientated and customer-orientated.
Whether youâre product- or customer-orientated, however, the first and most important principle of marketing is this: know your customer. When you understand how customers think and what they like, you can develop products or services that meet those needs and come up with appropriate and appealing ways to communicate them.
You need to understand your customer on two levels: the rational, functional dimension of making a purchase decision, and the irrational, emotional dimension. Every purchase, whether of a fizzy drink, a software program, a consulting service, a book or a manufacturing part, has both rational and emotional elements. So to truly know your customer, you need to explore two primary questions:
How do they feel about your product? Does it make them feel good? Do they like its personality? Do they like how it makes them feel about themselves?
What do they think about your product? Do they understand it? Do they think its features and benefits are superior to those of the competition and can meet their needs? Do they think that your product is good value given its benefits and costs?
Sometimes, one of these dimensions dominates for the customer you want to sell to. In other instances, all dimensions are equally important. Which is true of your customers? Depending o...
