Understanding the basics of marketing can help you improve your business revenues
Here are some of the basic mistakes that people make when thinking about how to use marketing to improve their business:
1. Anyone can do marketing
...............Only if you understand the processes
The answer is yes and no. Good ideas can come from anywhere but recognising which ones are the really strong ones and understanding why, does require expertise. You need to hit on the right answer, in the right place, at the right time and really engage people with your message. But to do this you need to have a deep understanding and clear goals.
2. Small or entrepreneurial businesses don’t need to follow a disciplined approach to understanding the market/ developing marketing strategies and plans
..............We will just try lots of things until something seems to work and it’s all about the lowest price
Marketing is part science, part magic, but you can’t do the magic part until you have put the foundations in place and to do that you need to understand the processes to follow
3. Marketing is just about advertising and PR
..............These things are only part of the picture, marketing is about everything you do to reach your target including, understanding who they are, your reputation, customer service and promotion.
This is probably the most common misunderstanding about marketing. That marketing is all about promotion whereas marketing is actually about the whole process of profitable selling, from product to channel, brand and promotion and critically understanding the consumers or clients you are going to target. This leads to the following misconceptions:
Advertising sells product
PR is the cheapest route
Internet marketing is all you need these days
4. The key to successful marketing is being different, creative, sexy and exciting and preferably all four!
..........The key to successful marketing is creating stand out for your target customers via awareness, and interest, relevance, and liking.
There is a formula to decide how much you should spend on marketing
..........There is no formula, there is only experience and developing a business case based on sound evidence. This is even more difficult for a new product launch or if you are launching in the UK. Fundamentally you need to understand what profitable business could like based on previous experience and previous spend, modelling at one end and making an intelligent guess at the other in order to decide what level of budget you can spend. On the positive side the best ideas don’t always come from the biggest budgets. The key particularly if you are working with a third party is to be clear about what the budget is.
