What Is Marketing?
Marketing is the reason why a brand interacts with its audience. Yet, this interaction shapes a brand as much as it influences it.
Marketing seems to be one of those elusive terms that every business person uses but is hard to define. What marketing means often depends on the context in which the term is used.
When I work with small business owners on their marketing strategies, I refer to marketing as the act of communicating the value of a product or service to potential customers in a brand-consistent manner.
This definition touches on four critical building blocks a business must implement before its marketing efforts can achieve the desired results.
1: Who Are Your Customers?
Understanding the goals and needs of existing and future customers and the challenges they face in achieving those goals are crucial insights.
If your market research uncovers a customer group that shares the same goals and faces the same challenges, you might see an opportunity to make money by offering a solution (product or service) that helps to overcome these challenges.
Suppose you discover that some customers' office space could flow more efficiently, and by redesigning it, they could rent a smaller space or increase the number of customers they serve. If you are an interior designer with a solution for this challenge, you have found your target customers.
For small businesses, it doesn't matter whether a market already exists. They rarely cover an entire market. Instead, small businesses try to stand out in a niche, focusing on specific groups of customers for whom their products or services are an excellent fit.
2: What Products or Services Do You Offer?
The products and services a business offers depend on the skills of its employees and how often they use these skills.
Don't offer wedding photography if you haven't taken professional pictures at live events. Or, don't open a dance studio if you are not a good dancer.
Hiring employees to fill a competency gap is always an option. You can open a restaurant without knowing how to cook and hire a chef to do it for you. However, relying on a few vital employees to cover a firm's core competencies can sometimes be risky for small businesses if one of these key employees leaves and takes your customers with them.
The skills of your team and how often they practice these skills determine whether your firm's competencies are advanced enough to succeed against your competitors.
How to Select New Markets: Markets that are compatible with your core competencies allow you to generate new revenues without increasing expenses.
Why Practicing Is the Key to Profitability: The more you practice, the sooner you will become an expert in your field and the less time it will take you to complete a task, increasing your business's profitability.
3: What Value Do Your Customers Derive From Your Products or Services?
If a product or service addresses a critical problem with potential customers, they will likely buy it. How much these customers are willing to pay depends on the subjective value these products or services create for them. The higher this value is, the higher the price your company can charge.
Value-Based Pricing in 7 Steps: If your customers are less price-sensitive and buy your products and services based on their features, value-based pricing can be a good option to increase your profit.
4: What Does Your Brand Represent?
A brand is how a product, a service, or a company is perceived by those who interact with it.
Strong brands stand for something, for example, timeless designs for luxury manufacturers or low prices for discount retailers.
Customers are attracted to brands whose values they share.
Defining what you want your brand to represent is crucial, similar to using a compass to find your way. This brand compass will become the guardrail that leads you to your target customers, determines the products and services you offer, and influences the value these customers derive from them.
Additionally, a company's brand values shape its communication style and determine its choice of channels.
What is a Brand Compass and Why Your Business Should Have One: A brand compass is a crucial tool to anchor your brand decisions and ensure coherence across all brand elements.
Communicate Effectively
When you know who your customers are, what products and services you offer, what values your customers derive from them, and what your brand represents, you have all the building blocks in place to communicate effectively with your audience through the channels they prefer.
Between the what, how, and where and the design of your promotional messages through typefaces, colors, pictures, and symbols, your communication becomes more deliberate, precise, and coherent.
But this communication is two-way. Marketing is the reason why a brand interacts with its audience. Yet, this interaction shapes a brand as much as it influences it.
This aspect of beneficial mutual influence has always fascinated me. So much so that I believe once a company stops listening to its customers and stops allowing these client ideas to influence it, it ceases to innovate, reinvent itself, and, ultimately, ends to be relevant.
Everything Starts With Your Brand! Why Branding is Crucial for Your Success: A brand that resonates with potential customers creates loyalty and valuable repeat business, but it also attracts new customers through free word-of-mouth marketing.
