Most marketing in business is disconnected and upside down.
What I’ve noticed in the last few years is there’s a disconnect between the way business owners approach their marketing and the approach that needs to be taken in order to make marketing successful.
To be successful with your marketing, you have to have a top-down approach to the market in which you operate.
Too many business owners operate from the bottom up. They are looking for the magic bullet, that one piece of communication that will result in riches pouring into their business.
THIS ARTICLE WILL TURN YOUR APPROACH TO MARKETING THE RIGHT WAY UP.
What we’ve found in surveying over ten thousand business owners in the last twenty years, is that most business owners are thinking with their marketing in a bottom-up approach, that is one communication at a time, one tactic at a time, one social media post at a time.
So let’s just start with, in our experience in what is the most successful way to approach a marketing challenge for any business?
And by marketing challenge, I mean the ability to find and communicate with the correct or ideal customer for your business in order to get that customer to become aware of you, and then to respond to your communications with a reach, or with a request to engage with you in business.
In some businesses and markets, this is a very quick process. Let’s say, for example, you’re selling a high quality muesli product at a farmer’s market, and you have a beautifully designed stand with some lovely packaging of your product all displayed nicely in the farmer’s market.
Somebody is walking down the aisle in that farmer’s market; they spot your display, so you’ve attracted their attention. They walk over, engage in communication with you, realise that this product meets their specific dietary needs. Maybe they’re gluten free or lactose intolerant or whatever, and they decide based on a warm communication with you, as the seller of that product, to purchase the product and take it away.
Sometime later they try the product, they like it, they then talk to their friends about the product, and the next time you’re at that farmer’s market they come back, and they buy more of your product.
IS YOUR MARKETING DISCONNECTED?
Too many businesses are focused on tactics. They’re looking to get a social media post that goes viral and drowns them in customers. They are constantly hearing consultants tell them they’ve found the social media secret to leads and riches.
But what we’ve found is this approach rarely works. And this is where marketing becomes disconnected.
What does work is this approach.
THE FIRST THING IS YOU HAVE TO IDENTIFY WHAT MARKET YOU’RE COMPETING IN.
There is the whole world out there if you like, and within that world, there are many, many different markets in many, many different industries. So you need to work through a process of understanding what market is it that you want to compete in with your products.
The first step includes understanding the dynamics of that market. What is the size of the market? Where is it located? What types of customers are in that market? What types of suppliers are in that market? And how you compare to those other suppliers and how your offer will engage and attract customers that are in that marketplace. So it’s an understanding of what the market looks like.
THE SECOND STEP IS TO ANALYSE.
The second part of a top-down marketing strategy is then analysing all of the components of that market and understanding how you can compete within that market effectively.
When I say compete effectively, I mean that you can make profitable sales. You can have a business at the size that you want it to have, making the profit or the financial, the revenue that you want to make in order for the business to provide for the purpose that you set it up for, which is to make revenue for you, or to help you pay off your home, or to pay for your holidays, or to support your lifestyle, or to put the kids through school.
You’re analysing it for your ability to meet the needs of the customers.
THE THIRD STEP IS PLANNING.
Based on all of this information, you’re planning what your goals are for that marketplace and your business over a specific planning period. Let’s say for example, that’s 12 month’s time, so you’re setting objectives for how many customers you want to get, how much revenue want to get, how much profit you want to make, how many products you want to sell, how many services you want to deliver, and you’re then also identifying, I guess, the simplicity of what you’re going to communicate to the ideal customer.
THE FOURTH STEP IS COMMUNICATING.
Only at this point do you actually begin the fourth step of communicating messages down various marketing communication channels. Whether that be a social media post, whether it be a blog article, whether it be a white paper of of tips on how to use your product or service in your marketplace and advert print advertising, TV, radio, sponsorship, promotions.
Finally, once you start implementing this communication program, then for each element of your marketing program.
THE FINAL STEP.
What is the return that you get for spending money on that TV ad or that social media post or that blog article? This is the last and final step of a top-down marketing strategy which is to measure what works and to strengthen the effective marketing that you’re doing. And as a result, to knock out, cancel, or stop the ineffective, disconnected marketing that you’re doing.
Originally published on Smallville.