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Marketing Basics -- Part 1
Where and When to Begin Your Marketing
by Jay Conrad Levinson
Marketing Your Marketing
by Jay Conrad Levinson
Marketing Basics -- Part 1
To succeed, entrepreneurs must attract and retain a growing base of satisfied customers. Marketing programs, though widely varied, are all aimed at convincing people to try out or keep using particular products or services. Business owners should carefully plan their marketing strategies and performance to keep their market presence strong.
What is Marketing?
Marketing is based on the importance of customers to a business and has two important principles:
All company policies and activities should be directed toward satisfying customer needs.
Profitable sales volume is more important than maximum sales volume
To best use these principles, a small business should:
Determine the needs of their customers through market research
Analyze their competitive advantages to develop a market strategy
Select specific markets to serve by target marketing
Determine how to satisfy customer needs by identifying a market mix
Market Research
Successful marketing requires timely and relevant market information. An inexpensive research program, based on questionnaires given to current or prospective customers, can often uncover dissatisfaction or possible new products or services.
Market research will also identify trends that affect sales and profitability. Population shifts, legal developments, and the local economic situation should be monitored to quickly identify problems and opportunities. It is also important to keep up with competitors' market strategies.
Marketing Strategy
A marketing strategy identifies customer groups which a particular business can better serve than its target competitors, and tailors product offerings, prices, distribution, promotional efforts, and services toward those segments. Ideally, the strategy should address unmet customer needs that offer adequate potential profitability. A good strategy helps a business focus on the target markets it can serve best.
Target Marketing
Owners of small businesses usually have limited resources to spend on marketing. Concentrating their efforts on one or a few key market segments - target marketing - gets the most return from small investments. There are two methods used to segment a market:
Geographical segmentation: Specializing in serving the needs of customers in a particular geographical area. For example, a neighborhood convenience store may send advertisements only to people living within one-half mile of the store.
Customer segmentation: Identifying those people most likely to buy the product or service and targeting those groups.
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Where and When to Begin Your Marketing
By Jay Conrad Levinson
Guerrillas are never stopped by analysis paralysis. Don’t let it stop you.
Many business owners realize the simplicity of marketing, but just don’t know where they should begin. Analysis paralysis stops them in their tracks. So many tasks. Where to start? So they don’t start. They know what they must do, but don’t really have a plan, so they make disconnected efforts to achieve a hazy goal. When they don’t see encouraging results right off the bat, they lose confidence, if any existed in the first place.
If there’s any correct time to start, it’s right now. If there’s any proper place, it’s right where you are. You’ll never feel you are completely ready, so you may as well begin immediately.
If there’s any secret to be learned, it’s the secret of taking action and never stopping. You’ve heard Diana Ross sing when she was a member of The Supremes. Hear now what she says about taking action: "You can’t just sit there and wait for people to give you that golden dream; you’ve got to get out there and make it happen for yourself."
Guerrillas have learned that the best time to market is when they don’t need any more business. They know that the best source of new clients is old clients and that the best marketing is characterized by quality and not quantity. They realize that their best marketing vehicle, and least expensive, is a satisfied customer. And they know that the two best ways to measure their marketing are by customer retention and by profits, both a part of each other.
It’s wise to think of your marketing the same as you think about your rent. You pay it and never think twice. It’s also wise to think of your marketing as breathing. You couldn’t exist with only one breath, or even two or three. Don’t think you’re going to attract a new customer with only one effort, or even two or three. You keep breathing and stay alive. You keep marketing and stay profitable.
Every part of your success is dependent upon one individual. You are that individual. You’re in charge. You say when to begin. You’ve got the insight to make the right decisions now. To succeed, you’re going to need that insight, along with courage and conscientiousness. If you’re frightened of making mistakes, you’re sunk. Accept that you’ll make mistakes. Each one has a lesson to be learned.
Michael Eisner, chairman and CEO of Disney, and the man who propelled it to undreamt of success, says, "At a certain level, what we do at Disney is very simple. We set our goals, aim for perfection, inevitably fall short, try to learn from our mistakes, and hope that our successes will continue to outnumber our failures." There’s nothing Mickey Mouse about that kind of philosophy -- because it embraces mistakes as part of the process.
There is no need to hit a home run the first time you’re at bat. A single will do, then another single, then another, one following each other, none grandiose, but all bringing you closer to your goal.
As small business grows, so does the need for mastering guerrilla marketing. And small business is growing faster than ever. As entrepreneurs arise all over the globe, so does the need for mastering guerrilla marketing. Just a new kid on the block as the 20th century headed towards its completion, guerrilla marketing is now a powerful and proven force worldwide. It must be reckoned with and best yet, utilized. Some would say it's mandatory for small business survival.
Ask any small business owner: It's far easier to employ guerrilla marketing than hope to defend yourself against it.
A whale of a lot has changed since I wrote the first guerrilla marketing book in l984. And almost all of it favors small business. Marketing itself has changed dramatically and interactively, not to mention electronically. So has the array of weapons available to guerrillas -- more powerful than ever, yet half of them completely free. That's why so many guerrillas are smiling so broadly. They also know that many things have not changed and that those things are as important as the things that have.
I'm referring to the soul and essence of guerrilla marketing which remain as always -- achieving conventional goals, such as profits and joy, with unconventional methods, such as investing energy instead of money. I'm also referring to humanity which is relatively unchanged since the first book, indeed, since the first human.
It's not possible to ignore the fact that we're in a new century, even though if you look out the window, you can't see much that has changed. If you look into the hearts and minds of your prospects, you'll see that very little has changed there, too. Certainly, there's a growing awareness of the precious and elusive nature of time, perhaps even a bit more humanity, made possible by, of all things, technology.
The marketing world has changed because it has shrunk rather than expanded. Again, credit technology for the shrink job, accomplished not as much by the jet as the net. Marketing has also become a lot more technical. But that doesn't mean you have to be technical -- because technology has met you more than halfway by becoming much easier to use and even easier to pay for.
Guerrillas welcome the changes as much as they welcome the status quos. They are fully alert to what has changed and what must never change. They know well the difference between change and improvement. Analysis paralysis is a condition that has been eliminated in their world.
Jay Conrad Levinson,The Father of Guerrilla Marketing?Author: "Guerrilla Marketing" series of books. Over 14 million sold; now in 42 languages. www.gmarketing.com?www.guerrillamarketingassociation.com
Marketing Your Marketing
By Jay Conrad Levinson
Don’t limit your marketing merely to the media you’re using. Market it all over the place. Anything worth promoting is worth cross-promoting.
Guerrillas know that all the media work better if they’re supported by the other media. Put your web site onto your TV commercial. Mention your advertising in your direct mail. Refer to your direct mail in your telemarketing. Plants the seeds of your offering with some kinds of marketing and fertilize them with other kinds.
You’re not really promoting unless you’re cross-promoting. Your trade show booth will be far more valuable to you if you promote it in trade magazines and with fliers put under the doors of hotels near the trade show. Guerrillas try to market their marketing.
Your prospects, being humans, are eclectic people. They pay attention to a lot of media so you can’t depend on a mere one medium to motivate a purchase. You’re got to introduce a notion, remind people of it, say it again, then repeat it in different words somewhere else. That share of mind for which guerrilla strive? They get it with they combine several media. They say in their ads, "Call or write for our free brochure."
They say in their Yellow Pages ad, "Get even more details at our website." They enclose a copy of their magazine ad in their mailing. They blow up a copy to use as a sign. Their website features their print ads.
Guerrillas are quick to mention their use of one medium while using another because they realize that people equate broadscale marketing with quality and success. They know that people trust names they’ve heard of much more than strange and new names;, and guerrillas are realistic enough to know that people miss most marketing messages -- often intentionally. The remote control is not only a way to save their steps but also a method of eliminating marketing messages.
No matter how glorious their newspaper campaign may be, guerrillas realize that not all of their prospects read the paper so they’ve got to get to these people in another way. No matter how dazzling their website, it’s like a grain of sand in a desert if it is not pointed out to an unknowing and basically uncaring public.
Cross-promoting in the media is another way to accomplish the all-important task of repetition. One way to repeat yourself and implant your message is to say it over and over again. Another way is to say it in several different places. Guerrillas try to do both. Nothing is left to chance. If you saw a yellow pages ad that made you an offer from a company you’ve never heard of and another with the same offer except that the ad said, "As advertised on television," you’d probably opt for the second because of that added smidgen of credibility. I rest my case.
The psychology of marketing requires basic knowledge of human behavior. Human beings do not like making decisions in a hurry and are not quick to develop relationships. They certainly do want relationships, but they’ve been stung in the past and they don’t want to be stung again.
They have learned well to distrust much marketing because of its proclivity to exaggeration. All too many times they’ve read of sales at stores and learned that only a tiny selection of items were on sale. They’ve been bamboozled more times than you’d think by the notorious fine print on contracts. And they’ve been high pressured by more than one salesperson.
That’s why they process your marketing communications in their unconscious minds, eventually arriving at their decisions because of an emotional reason even though they may say they are deciding based on logic. They factor a lot about you into their final decision -- how long they’ve heard of you, where your marketing appears, how it looks and feels to them, the quality of your offer, your convenience or lack of it, what others have said about you, and most of all, how your offering can be of benefit to their lives.
Although they state that they now want what you’re selling, and they do it in a very conscious manner, you can be sure they were guided by their unconscious minds. The consistent communicating of your benefits, your message and your name has penetrated their sacred unconscious mind. They’ve come to feel that they can trust you and so they decide to buy.
Any pothole in their road to purchasing at this point might dissuade them. They call to make an inquiry and they are treated shabbily on the phone? You’ve lost them. Do they access your website for more information and either find no website or find one littered with self-praise You’ve lost them. They visit you and feel pressured or misunderstood? They’re gone.
You’ve got to realize that the weakest point in your marketing can derail all the strong points. Excellence through and through, start to finish, is what people have come to expect from businesses, and these days, they won’t settle for less. The insight you must have is that marketing is a 360 degree process and you’ve got to do it right from all angles at all times. When it comes to marketing, people have built-in alarm systems, and any shady behavior on your part sets the bells to clanging, the sirens screaming.
It is very difficult to woo a person from the brand they use right now to your brand. Although they are loathe to change, they do change. And when they do, they patronize businesses that understand the psychology of human beings and the true nature of marketing.
Jay Conrad Levinson,The Father of Guerrilla Marketing Author: "Guerrilla Marketing" series of books. Over 14 million sold; now in 42 languages www.gmarketing.com www.guerrillamarketingassociation.com
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