Marketing Your Business Effectively

The first question you need to ask is - What is Marketing?

The Chartered Institute of Marketing define Marketing as “the management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably.”

In practice this means marketing is an important management tool for gaining new customers and developing existing sales. To make the most of this tool you need to do one key thing, create a Marketing Plan!

There are no hard and fast rules for the best way to create a marketing plan for your new business, but there are some basic activities you need to carry out as follows:

• Ask yourself where do I want my business to be in a year, two years and five years and how marketing can help you
• Define your target market/customers
• Investigate the best ways to communicate with your target market/customers about your product or service e.g. Yellow Pages advertising, mailshots, articles in specialist magazines, etc
• Identify the costs involved and set a budget
• Set clear objectives of how to get where you want to be in a year, two years and five years in terms of marketing
• Devise a timetable
• Decide how you will identify and measure your marketing success, for example, increased sales and coverage in local press
• Implement your marketing plan
• Monitor and review results to decide what works and what doesn’t, revise your plan!

When you are creating your marketing plan you need to make sure you cover what is known as the marketing mix or 4Ps:

• Product - the specifications of products/services, and how they relate to your customers needs, including warranties, support e.g. helplines, online information
• Price – setting a price including discounts and offers
• Place – how the product/service will get to the end consumer, e.g. online, retail, face-to-face this also covers which target market e.g. teenagers, families, pensioners, businesses
• Promotion – the way in which you are going to promote your product/service e.g. advertising, face-to-face sales, publicity

Planning your marketing activities is very important – if you don’t make good use of marketing your competitors will. Make marketing work for you!