3.9K views Marketing is one of the more wide-spread and misused terms in business. We often hear it refer to various business activities and processes, or maybe linked to ads and publicity done to promote a coming product.
In this piece, we will shed the light on what marketing is, why is it essential for a business, and a ten-steps guide to help you successfully market your offering.
What is Marketing?
Marketing is a mixture of science and art. It has set rules of a science, but also is largely dependent on the creativity and artistic sense of the marketer. According to Philip Kotler, a renowned figure in Marketing1, It is all about identifying, creating, and delivering value to meet the needs of a target market, creating profit.
Marketing is dependent on the size of organizations as large-scale companies usually dedicate separate departments for it, while startups don't have the resources to do so and carry out marketing activities embedded with other business operations. When done correctly, this later strategy of having no set department for marketing can actually be beneficial so that marketing activities are embedded throughout development, production, and sales.
Processes of Marketing
When your startup undertakes a marketing strategy, it should consist of:
- Identifying: Rather than seeking existing fulfilled needs, marketing seeks unfulfilled desires and needs.
- Creating Value: Creating value and product development for the target customer by developing and offering required products and services to meet their needs.
- Attraction: Attracting customers with advertisements and other methods so that they can notice, consider, and buy offered products and services to fulfill their desires.
- Retention: Once a customer has paid attention and is considering a product or service, it is important to retain this customer throughout the process until the sale actually happens. Loyalty is then built focusing on retaining the customer once again for another product or service.
- Delivering: Taking the value and delivering it to the target customer. This includes the mechanism of delivery, service during and after delivery, service fulfillment, and followup.
10 Steps for Successfully Marketing Your Product
This is what you came here for: a guide to help you build a sound and extensive marketing plan. The following is a 10-step guide for helping you successfully market your new product.
- Understand your Target Customer
- Understand your Business Model
- Pre-promotion: Pique People's Interests
- Get Validated
- Educate, Don't Just Promote
- Email marketing
- Social Media Power
- Offline Promotion
- Activities and giveaways
- Learn and repeat
Drafting and perfecting your avatar is a good first step as a successful marketing endeavor starts with a deep understanding of the prospective customer. Who is this customer and where is he/she to be found? how old are they and what is their income? what about their social status and background? interests? and so on.
It is important to ask such questions to identify where the target audience is and plan a good strategy to reach them. If you are, for instance, offering a vitamin drink with a lot of health benefits, it might be a good idea to start your marketing campaign in gyms, while if you are offering a digital design service, maybe your best option is to seek a club for business owners online or offline to target.
Understanding your business is not less important than understanding the customer. This does not mean only knowing what your product or service is. This goes back to understand the different components of your business model, and how each element connects to one another, building a Cost Structure and Revenue Streams in the end.
Riable offers a free full course on planning your business model with video and example here.
It is critical to create some urgency and momentum. Don't start promoting your products and services right away, but rather show a preview and start lobbying people behind your brand and products.
One way to accomplish this is via spreading the word on introductory offers where customers pay ahead of the product release date to have a special discount or added services.
Promotion will not do you good if you don't have authority or validation in the market. Authority and Validation are things that businesses build in time by continually delivering quality results.
For startups and new businesses however, this is something that often proves challenging. Practices to help raise this authority include guest-blogging, getting featured on online shows or podcasts, and getting a story written on your upcoming products and services by a respected online or offline news portal in your niche. The more that can be done here prior to the actual launch date, the better.
Starting the first step of the actual promotion stage, go all in and don't be shy. The main message should not be a pure sales pitch, but rather you should take an educational approach. Say that you are selling a book to help entrepreneurs improve their business, then the messaging should not be "Get our new book for $20 today", but rather in the lines of "Learn how to improve your bottom-line for early stage startups easily. Check out our new book".
Email is still one of the top tools utilized by marketers for its speed, personalization, and customization capability. Drip Marketing is a modern email marketing strategy that should be considered here. We have a detailed explanation on it here.
Social media organic promotions and posts and paid ads on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Linkedin, and other networks. Here, try to do an A/B test as offered by the Facebook ads platform in order to learn the best reach for the minimum amount to be paid.
It is good to not forget old-school techniques and methods, such as getting promotions on billboards, radio shows, street banners and the like. Word-of mouth can be very powerful when implemented correctly.
Create engagement activities around your offerings such as a contests or giveaways. This includes events that can help in promotion as well.
Learning from marketing and promotion efforts can help spot new marketing opportunities or help save costs. Make sure to follow the marketing campaign from the early stages of pre-promotion and repeat either for the same product or service (to get more customers) or for your new offerings.
Also, understanding how to correctly collect feedback on the campaign and offering can offer significant insights on what works and what doesn't, while good customer reviews can be reused in the promotions. Learn more about how to undertake feedback collection here.
