What is marketing? First, it’s about understanding the needs and wants of customers and providing them with greater value. You must clearly identify the demand in the marketplace. At a minimum, most businesses can improve significantly in this area. However, the real power and leverage of marketing comes from communicating your unique and superior value proposition.
Marketing is about communicating with and educating customers and prospects about why it’s in their best interest to do business with your company. It is about educating the right target audience on the unique and superior advantages, benefits, value and results you can provide.
It is about educating your target market on why they should trust you to deliver on your promises.
Instead of impacting one prospect at a time (i.e. direct selling), marketing allows you to influence many buyers at once. In a sense, marketing is a one-to-many selling system. Marketing allows you to target and influence large groups of customers at once.
Unfortunately, most owners mistakenly try to tackle goals (sales) with a one-to-one mentality. Instead of considering the leverage of marketing (strategic alliances, referral systems, direct mail, telemarketing, etc.), many remain in the same comfort zone and rut of using a single weapon like direct selling. They miss the chance to use air support (marketing) to aid their ground war (selling). They fail to consider new strategies.
While all businesses have a selling process (converting leads to customers), most do not have a legitimate marketing process (generating qualified leads).
Your goal should be to add an ongoing marketing process to your business. Think of marketing as ongoing education to customers.
Five ways to grow business:
– Keep the customers you have
– Bring in more customers,
– Increase the average transaction size (unit sale),
– Increase the frequency of purchases
– Say “no” to bad customers/ prospects.
If you keep what you have, bring in more customers, sell larger amounts and sell to them more often, your business can grow by quantum leaps.
Contact Mark Dipple at m.dipple@thegrowthcoach.com