3 Secrets to Marketing.
We can think of marketing as having 3 main components: the message, the market, and the medium.
Your Message
Your marketing message is what you say about you explicitly. Most business owners don’t have a clear message at all - the best they can come up with is something like “we’ve been in business since 1978 and we give good service”.
Come on... that’s not a marketing message! No one cares how long you’ve been in business, and giving good service is a minimum expectation! Do you really want to shout from the rooftops how you do an “adequate job?”.
No. A proper marketing message is strong and powerful, and conveys an unbeatable promise. Sometimes it’s called your “Unique Selling Proposition” or USP, and encapsulates the reason people should do business with you rather than with your competitors.
Your Market
Your market is the people you ideally want to sell to. Too many business owners take the view their ideal customer or client is anyone with the money to pay their fees.
This is a bad strategy. The more precisely you can define the ideal person you want to have as a customer or client, the more accurately you can craft your message. Moreover, for reasons I won’t go into here, the more you niche yourself, the higher the prices you can charge will be, even if your products and services are practically identical to your “generalist” competitors.
Obviously, choosing your market and message is something of an iterative process. Sometimes, especially if you’re approaching your marketing in this new way for the first time, you might not know who your market is until you start thinking about your message; and then, you can often change your market by changing your message.
What’s more, when you look at your results you can see what’s working, where it’s working, and with whom it’s working.
Your Media
Finally, we have the means by which you get your message over to your market. This is the very last thing to decide in your marketing mix.
Why?
Because until you know whom you’re speaking to and know what you’re going to say, you can’t possibly know the right way to reach them.
Most business owners get this wrong, and choose the medium before they do anything else.
How does this happen?
As often as not, they get ambushed by a silver-tongued advertising rep from a local newspaper or other medium and get sold on some advertising space (always sold to them as a “special offer” which is really nothing more than an arbitrary and often false discount).
Take it from me: small businesses are better off sticking to good, solid and old-fashioned direct marketing technique.
For most small businesses, the best marketing media are the Internet and direct mail. Advertising is a tough nut for most small business owners to crack (but it’s always worth testing it cheaply and on a small scale, because once you do crack it, it’s often very profitable). This goes back to the marketers’ mantra: “test, test, test”; and it’s why you should be using direct marketing, because it’s measurable and you can see exactly how the ads are performing.
Take a look around the rest of this site, and get into some of the specific marketing strategies you can put to work for you right now and have them making money for you by tomorrow!
Happy Marketing!
Chris Cardell
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