Following the marketing wheel of fortune

Every successful marketing program — whether for a billion-dollar business or a solo entrepreneur — follows the marketing cycle illustrated in Figure 1-1. The process is exactly the same whether yours is a start-up or an existing business, whether your budget is large or small, whether your market is local or global, and whether you sell through the Internet, via direct mail, or through a bricks-and-mortar location.

Just start at the top of the wheel and circle around clockwise in a never-ending process to win and keep customers and to build a strong business in the process.

As you loop around the marketing wheel, here are the marketing actions you take:

1. Conduct research to gain knowledge about your customers, product, market area, and competitors.
2. Tailor your product, pricing, packaging, and distribution strategies to address your customers’ needs, your market environment, and your competitive realities.
3. Create and project marketing messages to reach your prospective customers, inspire their interest, and move them toward buying decisions.
4. Go for and close the sale — but don’t stop there.

5. After you make the sale, begin the customer service phase.

   Work to develop relationships and ensure high levels of customer satisfaction so that you convert the initial sale into repeat business, loyalty, and word-of-mouth advertising for your business.

6. Interact with customers to gain insight about their wants and needs and their use of and opinions about your products and services.

   Combine customer knowledge with ongoing research about your market area and competitive environment. Then use your findings to fine-tune your product, pricing, packaging, distribution, promotional messages, sales, and service.

And so the marketing process goes around and around.

Successful marketing has no shortcuts — you can’t just jump to the sale. To build a successful business, you need to follow every step in the marketing cycle, and that’s what the rest of this book is all about.

Understanding the relationship between marketing and sales

People make the mistake of thinking marketing is a high-powered or dressed-up way to say sales. Or they treat marketing and sales as two independent functions that they mesh together under the label marketing and sales.

In fact, sales is an essential part of marketing, but it’s not and never can be a replacement for the full marketing process. Selling is one of the ways you communicate your marketing message. It’s the point at which you offer the product, you make the case, the customer makes a purchasing decision, and the business-to-customer exchange takes place.

Without all the marketing steps that precede the sale — fitting the product to the market in terms of features, price, packaging, and distribution (or availability), and developing awareness and interest through advertising, publicity, and promotions — even the best sales effort stands only a fraction of a chance for success.

Marketing a start-up business

If your business is just starting, your marketing plan needs to address a set of decisions that existing businesses have already made. Existing companies have images to build upon, whereas your start-up business has a clean slate upon which to write exactly the right story.

Before sending messages into the marketplace, answer these questions:

• What kind of customer do you want to serve? (See Book 1, Chapter 2.)
• How will your product compete with existing options available to your prospective customer? (See Book 1, Chapter 2.)
• What kind of business image will you need to project to gain your prospect’s attention, interest, and trust?

A business setting out to serve corporate clients would hardly want to announce itself by placing flyers on community bulletin boards. On the other end of the spectrum, a start-up aiming to win business from cost-conscious customers would probably be better off announcing a promotion-packed open house than placing large ads full of praise from affluent business leaders.

If you’re marketing a start-up business, pay special attention to these first few chapters. They can help you identify your customers, make pricing decisions, present your product, size up your competition, and set your goals and objectives.

Growing your business

Most established businesses grow their revenues by following one of the following routes:

• Grow market share by pulling business away from competitors. (See Book 1, Chapter 3.)
• Grow customer share either by prompting larger transactions during each visit or by generating more frequent repeat business.
• Grow interest in new offerings that generate additional sales volume for your business. (See Book 1, Chapter 2.)

Almost always, the most cost-efficient route to higher sales volume is to look inside your business first, shore up your product and service offerings, and strengthen your existing customer satisfaction and advertising spending levels before trying to win new prospects, which requires significantly more effort and expense.

Scaling your marketing to meet your goal

Small business owners often feel overwhelmed by the marketing task. They aren’t sure how much money they should dedicate to the effort, whether they need to hire marketing professionals, how to weight efforts between traditional media and online communications, and whether they need to create new ads, brochures, and websites to get the job done.

Do those uncertainties sound familiar? If so, detour around the questions and get into forward motion by first putting your marketing task in perspective. Ask these questions:

• How much business are you trying to gain?
• How many clients do you want to add?

Whether you’re launching a new business or accelerating the growth of an existing enterprise, defining what you’re trying to achieve makes everything easier.

A social-service agency may set a goal to raise $100,000 in donor funds. An accounting firm may want to attract six corporate clients. A retailer may want to build an additional $50,000 in sales. A doctor may want to attract 100 patients for a particular new service. An e-publisher may want to achieve 500 downloads.

By setting your goal first (more on this important step in Book 1, Chapter 4), the process of creating your marketing plan becomes a focused, goal-oriented, and vastly easier activity.

Dollar differences

As a small business marketer, you already know one difference between your marketing program and those of the corporate behemoths that loom over you in all directions: The big guys have the big budgets. They talk about a couple hundred thousand dollars as a discretionary line-item issue. You talk about a couple hundred dollars as an amount worthy of careful consideration. The advice in this book is scaled to your budget, not to the million-dollar jackpots you see referenced in most other marketing books.

Staffing differences

Look at the organization chart of any major corporation. Nearly always, you find a marketing vice president. Under that position you see a bunch of other professionals, including advertising directors, sales managers, online and social-media marketing managers, research directors, customer service specialists, and so on. In contrast, strong small businesses blend marketing with the leadership function. The small business organization chart often puts responsibility for marketing in the very top box, the one with the owner’s name, which likely puts you in the essential role of overseeing marketing as a hands-on task.

Creative differences

The top-name marketers routinely spend six figures to create ads with the sole purpose of building name recognition and market preference for their brands, often without a single word about a specific product or price.

Small businesses take a dramatically different approach. They want to develop name recognition just like the biggest advertisers, but their ads have to do double duty. You know firsthand that each and every small business marketing investment has to deliver immediate and measurable market action. Each effort has to stir enough purchasing activity to offset the marketing cost involved. The balancing act — and the focus of the chapters in Book 5 — is to create marketing communications that build a clear brand identity while also inspiring the necessary consumer action to deliver inquiries, generate leads, and prompt sales — now.

Strategic differences

In big businesses, bound copies of business plans are considered part of the furnishings, whereas in many small businesses, the very term marketing plan provokes a pang of guilt.

Truth is, creating a marketing plan is pretty straightforward and reasonably manageable. It’s one of those pay-a-little-now-or-pay-a-lot-more-later propositions. If you invest a bit of time up-front to plan your annual marketing program, implementation of the plan becomes the easy part. But without a plan, you’ll spend the year racing around in response to competitive actions, market conditions, and media opportunities that may or may not fit your business needs.

The small business marketing advantage

As a small business owner, you may envy the dollars, people, and organizations of your big business counterparts, but you have some advantages they envy as well.

The heads of Fortune 500 firms allocate budgets equal to the gross national products of small countries to fund the research required to get to know and understand their customers. Meanwhile, you can talk with your customers face to face, day after day, at virtually no additional cost.

Because the whole point of marketing is to build and maintain customer relationships, no business is better configured to excel at the marketing task than the small business.

What’s more, today’s customers don’t just crave interactive communication with the businesses they buy from — they demand it. In the biggest of big businesses, shifting from one-way communication to two-way, interactive communication involves monumental shifts in how the business markets. Meanwhile, for your small business, shifting toward interactive marketing is simply a matter of making the choice to get online, get social, get talking, and get involved in two-way communications that give your business a marketing edge.