Marketing Your Business

Make the Internet Work for You Get into Exports Learn about Products and Pricing

John Westwood

• Publisher: Kogan Page
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9780749462710
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780749462727
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Entrepreneurship
• Index: Business

Although the basic principles and theories of marketing haven't changed, many of the tools have. With new reliance on online tools to get results, it's more important than ever for businesses to be up-to-date on the latest techniques. Marketing Your Business covers all of these aspects of marketing to develop a strategy and increase profit, including detailed advice on how to carry out market research in the digital age and how to use the resulting information to develop specific objectives and strategies. It explains how to use the internet, set up websites and online shops, use traditional and online public relations including social media, plan advertising and sales promotion campaigns, prepare sales literature and manage exhibitions.Also with practical advice and tips on getting into export as well as a thorough explanation of the new market concept of Application Selling, Marketing Your Business is an all-in-one guide to everything you need to know about marketing today and is an essential resource for your business.

Chapter three

Situation analysis

Any plan of action that you take to grow your business requires:

• establishing where you are now (situation analysis);
• deciding where you want to get to (setting objectives);
• deciding how to get there (selecting strategies and devising action plans).

This holds true whether you are planning your company budget for next year, a project to expand your sales overseas or a simple campaign to increase sales of a particular product.

In Chapter 2 we looked at the methods of carrying out market research and the types of data that are available. You can use these methods to examine your company’s markets, customers and competitors as well as the overall economic and political environment that you are operating in. It addition to external market research you need to collect historical data about your company and its products. It is only when you start to analyse your own in-house data that you realize which market sectors you need to look at outside, and once you look at the external data you may notice applications that are small for your company but larger in a market context and therefore require further investigation.

Internal market research

In addition to external market research your company will have a wealth of internal data, but it is likely that much of this will not be available in the right form. You may have overall sales data, but not data itemized for individual product lines or market segments. The historical information that you need is sales/order data separated and analysed in a way that reflects the key market segments into which you sell your products.

Market segmentation

Different customers have different needs. They do not all require the same product and they do not all require the same product benefits. Even with an individual product, not all customers will buy it for the same reasons. Market segmentation allows you to consider the markets you are actually in and the markets that your company should be in.

You need to be able to split your customer base up into groups of customers who all have similar needs. Each of these groups constitutes a market segment.

For consumer goods and services, it is usual to classify the end-users by the use of methods of classification that separate consumers by socio-economic group, age, sex, occupation or region.

The marketing of industrial goods and services is different, because the customer is usually another company or a government department. The number of customers is therefore more likely to be 10 thousand than 10 million and cou...

Table of contents

• Cover page
• Title page
• Dedication
• Imprint
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Introduction
• 01 Marketing – the basics
• 02 The effective use of marketing research
• 03 Situation analysis
• 04 Websites and e-commerce
• 05 The role of public relations in the internet age
• 06 Channels to market
• 07 Advertising and sales promotion
• 08 Promotional materials, presentations and exhibitions
• 09 Products and pricing
• 10 Application selling
• 11 Getting into overseas markets
• Useful websites
• Full imprint