Marketing article: 5 Powerful Steps to Successful Marketing

Article Tips > Marketing

This Newsletter is one of a series which aims to help you grow your sales and increase your margins by giving you access to the best marketing strategies around.

The Collins English Dictionary defines marketing simply as the provision of goods or services to provide customer needs. The ‘marketing mix’ includes the variables such as price, promotion and service to meet customer or consumer needs.

Wikipedia says Marketing is a social and managerial function that attempts to create, expand and maintain a collection of customers.

Most organisations tend to have a marketing function, alongside finance, production, distribution and HR. There is no doubt that without marketing most businesses will fail. In our wide experience it is more a philosophy and management style and must not be confused with selling.

At one level marketing is very simple stuff. However, people take degrees in the subject and it is a vital element in top class MBAs. For others it is a black art directly linked to TV commercials and subliminal selling.

There are many books on Marketing. People who have created and implemented marketing plans and learned from their mistakes have written some of the best books. Many are written for multinational organisations with large budgets. For SMEs, you must keep marketing as simple as possible.

So why are so many small to medium organisations ‘marketing challenged’? Believe me marketing is easy. You just need to follow a few steps, testing and checking as you move from step to step. If a step suggests it, you should not be afraid of changing your plans or indeed scrapping the idea altogether.

Three big concepts you should not forget.

1. Customers are more important than prospects. Satisfied customers will buy again and recommend you to others.
2. Benefits come before features. Customers and prospects are more interested in what you can do for them than in how you do it.
3. Offering a continuous low price does not work. Customers look for added value. Most mistrust ‘low price for ever’ strategies. Most will not shop around for the lowest price.

Five Steps to Successful Marketing.

Don’t spend serious money and time unless you have followed these steps. Each step becomes progressively more expensive.

Step One. On one side of A4, clearly define your product or service, quantify your immediate objectives, describe your target customers, as you see it describe the benefits to them and why they should choose you above competition. Check with people not directly involved with the project. Does it make sense? Would they buy it? Seek objective criticism. Make changes and re-check. If it is a commercial project, when does it start to make a profit?

Step Two. Gather as much information as possible about your customers, the market place and your competition. Start in your files, read customer complaints and customer endorsements, interview any staff with a direct connection with customers, discreetly speak to your customers, ask trade bodies for information, search the internet, visit business libraries, become a prospect for a competitor, if low cost buy competitors product or service, acquire specialist market research, if you have the time attend trade shows, exhibitions, networking events and seminars. Use the information to answer any ‘unknowns’ and to beef up the elements in Step One. Change the project as required. Does it still make sense to your test panel? If it is a commercial project, when does it start to make a profit?

Step Three. When you have formulated an idea for the project, speak to your customers or prospects to gain a reaction. If you have more than one idea or several versions of an idea you need to talk to more people. If you are looking for a winner you probably need to gather quantitative data using a self-completion questionnaire. Make it easy to fill in e.g. tick boxes. Offer an incentive to participate. To ease reply use on-line surveys or freepost mail. Gather demographic data. Reinforce security and DP issues. Apply standard deviation to measure significance.

It is unlikely you will achieve significance with 10% response to 1000 consumer questionnaires but you may with a 10% response to 1000 b2b questionnaires. Test the questionnaire before sending to your customer file. Other techniques include hall tests, street interviews, exit interviews and mystery shoppers. Omnibus surveys are used to establish a much bigger sample size but with a limited number of questions.

If you are looking for greater customer insight to a concept or project you will need to undertake the more expensive qualitative research. Focus groups, workshops, one to one interviews are all techniques to be considered. Objectivity using an external moderator is necessary. Remember market research exercises do not produce creativity. All the creativity must come from you or your agencies.

The other thing to realise is most of your competitors will not be researching - which gives you a massive competitive advantage.

Step Four. It is likely that the product or service proposition will change as a result of the information gathered in Step 3. Go back to the one side of A4 from Step One and see if changes need to be made to the basic business plan. Now list all the opportunities you have. This is the creative part. Try brainstorming – it can work or be a complete waste of time – but it is cheap and fun to do. Look at all the market opportunities open to you. Cost the options. If it is a commercial project, when does it start to make a profit? You may decide to have different projects/services for several markets.

Step Five. Produce a marketing plan for the next 12 months in some detail. Years two and three are needed for cash flow. Producing a 5 year plan is generally a waste of time – unless it is a large capital project with a long gestation period. Produce the product/service and test it with the new target groups or even go back to the original market research respondents. Test the advertising and promotional materials – especially if direct marketing is the main strategy.

Visit our web site http://www.deve.co.uk for more information and marketing hints and tips. Free advice on marketing strategies is one thing, implementing it with working knowledge, creativity, objectivity and flair is how we can make a difference.

To discuss a project call Chris Edwards 00 44 870 240 3139 or email info@deve.co.uk