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 How To Create An Effective Marketing Strategy For Your New Business
By Andrea Feinberg
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What's marketing? It's this: 'effective marketing is communicating the availability of a specific and wanted benefit to the audience that has told you it wants that benefit.'
Tactics to get product in customers' hands – sales, advertising, public relations, event sponsorship, web site, newsletters, promotional goodies etc. – get their marching orders from knowing the benefit you're communicating and your audience. If that marriage is not sound, none of the tools will have long-term benefit.
Planning an effective marketing strategy begins with understanding:
•who your target audience is (focus),
•what it wants as a result of doing business with you (customer orientation),
•what messages will spark a recognition (consistency),
•the marketing road goes on forever or the party ends (persistence).
These are Feinberg's Fab Four Foundations of Marketing (what can I say? I grew up with John, Paul, George and Ringo).
Here's a brief summary of what must be in place before embarking on a marketing strategy:
Customer Orientation
It's wonderful to want to give, but if what you offer is what you want
to give & not what your prospects want to receive, you don't
have a sale – you have good intentions. That's customer orientation – giving the
person what they want as a result of doing business with you. This is often a
challenge for entrepreneurs who are passionate about what they sell and not
equally passionate about what makes their product enticing to a buyer. It's never the product, it's always the perceived result. Do you know what pain or pleasure is relevant to your audience?
FOCUS
You can't answer that question unless you know who your customer is. Some businesses are generalists, seeking to serve all. My contention is:
•this dilutes your marketing efforts;
•it's harder for a prospect to feel that you're the right provider;
•it's unclear how others should refer business to you;
•the larger the market, the tougher it is to reach.
The smaller the market, the easier it is for you to research, understand and meet its
needs; it's less expensive to find and market to them.
CONSISTENCY
Prospects know you 'get them' by the image you craft; literature appearance, language,
policies, media choices create a consistent or confusing image and message. Always
go for 'consistent'.
Consistency also means matching clients' needs to the language of your messages
and placing messages where the audience is receptive to them.
PERSISTENCE
This is what holds it all together: if you've found your niche (focus), your messages
are all appropriate for your target (consistency) and oriented to resolving their pain
or providing their sought benefit (customer orientation), the last element you need is persistence.
Just because you've got it right, doesn't mean your target is prepared to buy now. Timing
is on the side of your prospect and something you cannot control (although you can
influence it by minimizing risk of buying from you). Therefore, persistence is key to making
the rest of your work pay off.
When you know the answers to the first 3 imperatives, the fourth will be ruled by your
resources: time, money, skills, connections. Together, the information gathered from
these 'Fab Four' will guide your beginning strategy, and you'll start to have hits just like the
original Fab Four!
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