Marketing

No one is an expert until they have done the research. No matter what the person who has been in the industry for years says, or how passionate the creative wizz is about the ad they made, without knowledge behind them, how can they say they are delivering something effective?

We need to segment the market when we are doing our marketing plans so we can find the most valuable group of people to target later, but it should also come naturally when we are market orientated or customer focussed with developing our products.

Who is your customer? Don’t try and target everyone. Find a valuable segment of the market, and target them well. Make the decision to not target certain segments so you can be more focussed in your targeting to the segments you do target.

Positioning is not about what we as a marketer do to the product, it is what our marketing can do in the mind of the customer.

A marketing/sales funnel is the tool to use when deciding what type of marketing content you need to produce, where to position it, and also to see where you are loosing traffic or business.

Ask yourself the question: What type of promotion fits with what you want to say at different stages of the marketing funnel? Remember, advertising is not marketing.

Digital is a marketing tactic, part of a wider marketing strategy, and should not be considered the strategy in and of itself.

Take 10% of your marketing budget and use it for research. It could help you spend the remaining 90% far better and open your eyes to who the customer really is, and what they want.