Step 1 The basics.
What is marketing?
Ask six people the same question and you will get six different answers, we can all understand the concept of sales but marketing is much more elusive.
Marketing need not be complicated although a lot of people spend a lot of time and charge a lot of money to convince you that it is some kind of “magic” and can only be dispensed by special “marketing gurus” that know all the answers.
Well, let’s clear a couple of things up;
Marketing is not “magic” and you do not need to be a “marketing guru” to dispense it.
You, the reader, given certain information and techniques can develop your own marketing plan and most importantly use this plan to achieve your objectives, be they, profitable, strategic or simply putting you in control of the type of customers you attract.
Let’s just hold that thought for a while attract the right kind of customers.
Imagine, if you could attract the kind of customers that you want. How powerful would that be?
Customers that wanted what you offered, paid on time, did not complain and actually enjoyed doing business with you.
Well that is a good example of what good marketing is; attracting the prospects you want and providing them with the products that they want.
Quite simple really.
So if that is good marketing can there be bad marketing.
Oh yes, there is plenty of that around.
Here is an example of bad marketing;
Paul runs a company making steel railings for security purposes. Many of his customers are slow payers and very demanding, so he figures that if he has more customers he will be less reliant on those customers that give him a hard time.
This makes sense, so Paul gets a database of all the prospects that are in the same category as the people he currently does work for and sends it out.
Paul gets many enquiries and a whole lot of new work.
Guess what? The new customers are just as troublesome as the previous set.
This is a surprisingly common problem, by going through the stepped marketing turbo you can avoid this by carefully identifying the prospects that you want, making sure your product is what they want and effectively marketing to them.
Now something that you get taught back in marketing school is the 5 p’s.
To get the rest of the step 1 sequence click here