Marketing is crucial to your business success. So many of us are wasting our money and efforts in marketing strategies that just don’t work. Most businesses have a ‘hit-and-miss’ approach to marketing. Why? Because that’s what our competitors are doing! They don’t know any different and they’re just following the crowd. But marketing is all about being different - standing out in the crowd. And the reason most of us aren’t doing that is because we don’t understand marketing and what it can achieve for us.
Marketing really involves a wide range of areas. Not all of them are relevant to every business. The more common elements of marketing include: public relations, pricing, signage, location, website, packaging, stationery, telemarketing, advertising and receptionist. Note that this is not a complete list. For instance, it doesn’t include word-of-mouth, visual communication and written communication.
Simple marketing clues
Here are some simple clues on marketing that you may be able to implement in your own business:
Strategy
Develop a strategy for your brand or service and then everyone in the company needs to buy into that strategy.
Focus
You need to have a single-minded focus on what your marketing needs to achieve for your business. Don’t be distracted by what your competitors are doing or by clever marketing gimmicks. Stick to your strategy.
Speak with one voice
You cannot say or promise too many things or you will confuse people. All your marketing tools—whether your brochure or your website or newspaper advertisements—need to speak with one voice and one message.
Don’t try to communicate everything
Too many companies want to include the full book about their product or service in a magazine advertisement or television commercial. All they successfully do is bore everyone and turn customers off.
Break the pattern
Whatever you are doing now, you are not standing out. You may feel comfortable and happy because you are employing nice, traditional communication tactics, but you need to break the pattern and be uncomfortable with it. Then you will stand out and see results.
Reflect who you want to be
Make sure your advertising and everything you do in marketing is a reflection of what you want to portray as a company. What do you stand for as a company? Does everything you do—spoken, written and visual (such as colours and typeface) —reflect your company or product?
How do you measure success
If you are a retailer and your product is sold through supermarkets, you expect cash registers to ring. If you are in the service industry, you need sales leads. If you are trying to change the image of your company, you need to have some trigger in place that enables you to measure whether your marketing is working. Good marketing is extremely powerful, so just spending money on marketing and not measuring the results is poor management.
The timing of your success
You need to know what you want your marketing to achieve… and by when? A timeline is important. It also needs to be realistic and achievable.
Research
Research can be a great tool in marketing, but it can also be overused and abused. I have often sat with clients to watch research companies conduct surveys and focus groups. I have then skimmed across the research data provided after the event and come to my own conclusions about where we need to go. It’s fine if researchers provide their own overview for you, but in the end they often do not understand your product or service… or even your market. Most of their work is done in a clinical environment and it can only give you a view based on that research.
The co-founder of advertising firm Doyle Dane Bernbach International, Bill Bernbach, once said, “We are so busy measuring public opinion that we forget we can mold it. We are so busy listening to statistics we forget we can create them.” This is a very succinct statement regarding research and extremely important to take note of. We need to realize that we can actually go out and create the market! We can go out and build the market to a new level. And we don’t need research to help us do that.