According to businessdictionary marketing is the management process through which goods and services move from concept to the customer. Marketing techniques and strategies are really based on what it takes to identify the right product mix, the prices for those products, and what needs to be communicated to target customers (via advertisement) in order to ensure successful sales. It includes the coordination of four elements called the 4 P's of marketing:
(1) identification, selection and development of a product,
(2) determination of its price,
(3) selection of a distribution channel to reach the customer's place, and
(4) development and implementation of a promotional strategy.
Marketing is a long term approach from the very conception of a product. It is the unification of resources towards the development of product, determining the price of the product after duly considering the cost of production. Selection of a distribution channel through which you can get to your targeted customers, and choosing a suitable means of advertising. Market is the whole process from the conception of a product to the point where it gets to the targeted consumers you wish to package and brand your product for.
For marketing to be successful, it involves in depth work in terms knowing exactly who your target market is. Can you imagine a world without goods transfer from one company, country, or individual to another? That world is ideal. As the world advances, the need for marketing increases and as such there are many folks in the field. The fact is that not everyone has a clue of what marketing is really all about. Marketing is not just selling your goods and services as this might be the conception of many. Marketing deals with all the strategy. The initial conception of a product, the cost of production, the price of the product, the distribution strategy, the feel and look of your product, your advertising media and the mindset of your client after any transaction with you. That’s what marketing is all about. Does your customer feels good and want to come back again and again thereafter?
How do you convince someone with a lot of bills to pay off, children to fend for, and many financial problems to purchase your product. The odds are that you will find it hard. That very skill that enables a marketer to convince a potential buyer defines his uniqueness and professionalism. That is what I call the efficient and effective marketing plan. Efficient here could mean, having the best products and services, the best branding and advertising strategies but what makes marketing effective is a marketers ability to convince his client to pay for his products sincerely (not manipulatively) and still feel good about the purchase.
Here are 7 strategies that will help you make efficient and effective marketing.
THE 7 MOST EFFICIENT AND EFFECTIVE MARKETING STRATEGIES
These 7 efficient and effective marketing strategies have been carefully developed through several years of working with independent professionals. Marketing can be overwhelming and unclear. Where do you begin? These 7 strategies are worthy starting point. As you learn and implement them into your marketing, you'll get more attention and interest from prospects and ultimately turn them into great clients who you love to work with. Remember to apply them because that is the only way it can work for you.
1. Identify your market
The first step to developing a marketing plan is making research. You don’t come up one day and start marketing to anyone that you see. You need to make research and ask yourself, who needs my products or services, what age range am I producing for, what’s their level of income, and how do I advertise such that it appeal to them.
Identifying you market is the first step and strategy to marketing success. This is because the better you know your market, the demand for your product or services and the classes of persons that needs your services, the better you can appeal to their needs.
A few ways to research are as follows
- Watching related and our recommended YouTube videos.
- Visiting your library for local records
- Checking trade magazines and business newsletters related to your market for statistics and buying trends.
- Sourcing out information from other business partners in the field.
- Making use of traditional questionnaires to access your customers directly.
These are but a few ways you can source information on the market you wish to embark upon. So you can know your target audience and focus on marketing to them. We now have a tool like Facebook targeted advertising to mention but a few. Use this tools and get started identifying your market and knowing who your prospective clientele are.
2. Develop your unique brand.
Polishing your brand look and feel is a good way to create reputation for your business. You could create unique and professional business logo. You also want to keep it simple and memorable but professional and use it everywhere like in business cards, questionnaires, brochures and even websites and blogs.
3. Uncover Your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
A unique selling proposition (USP) is a factor that distinguishes a product or service from its rivals. This factor could be the highest quality, the first-ever product of its kind or the lowest price. A USP could be thought of as “what you have that competitors don't.”
Your Unique Selling Proposition could also be seen as the main benefit that, when communicated excellently, drives sales of your product or service. It focuses on a unique problem that you solve better than anyone else. Your USP must be captivating and fascinating enough to move people to act. Your USP will be central to all of your marketing interactions, so don't take this step casually.
4. Address your marketing approach
Not only is there an Outer Game of Marketing, there's an Inner Game as well. The inner game of marketing is about your attitude or mindset about marketing. And like everything else in life, your attitude and mindset determine how you approach something and whether or not you succeed at it.
However, like I said earlier it's too bad that marketing is so misunderstood. It might be better to think of marketing as "exploring probabilities." This is because it could either work out or not. Marketing should not be a manipulative or serpentine process. Just the opposite, in fact. In a selling conversation you mostly ask questions and listen to determine if your prospect really needs assistance and if you are able to ethically provide that assistance. Pressure of any kind only backfires.
Your marketing approach matters a lot and really determines the outcome of your supposed marketing. Many independent professionals really tussle with what exactly to ask? How to explain their services? How to close, confirm and ask for the money.
There is a saying that people like to buy and not to be sold to. This implies that as long as they feel good about what is being bought, they purchased it and it was not sold to them. Customers always take that credit. So instead of worrying about how to market your product and services, how about finding means of helping your customer to buy instead of selling to them.
These are simple tips how you can easily help them buy rather than sell to them.
1. Don’t sell
You don’t want to impose a product to your customer or client just because you want to get that one off your store.
2. Listen for the problem and connect.
Be sure to always want to sincerely know your customers problem. Ask deep questions that can unravel their challenges. Discover why it is a challenge, what they’ve done to avert it, what worked and what didn’t. It’s only through effective listening and trying to ascertain what the real problem is that you can discover if you can help you prospect or not.
3. Help them buy.
If you’ve really figured out that you have a solution that can match what your consumer wants, politely make the suggestion. Hey I have a product that match what you’re looking for, see if you can try it out. Now you can let them take a look while you explain why you think it would for them.
Once you have been able to listen for the real problem, connect with them, and sort out the real solution chances are that they will buy from you and not only will they just buy, they will come back again and again. This is a great approach for marketing. You could use this marketing approach recently working for millions or you can create a similar one that best suites you. The main motive is to help your customers buy rather than sell to them.
Addressing your marketing approach today can have a more profound impact on your Marketing Effectiveness than anything else.
5. Build Reliability and Trust.
Reliability is the ability of a business organization, individual, or corporate body to consistently perform its intended or required function or mission, on demand without failure or fall in value of product and services.
What you want to ask yourself is can your customers rely on you. Can they depend on you to consistently give them that same service for which they are back at your business premises? Normally business persons tend to deliver great services to first-time customers so as to get them coming back for more. But the truth of the matter is that those kind of customers don’t last, because customers return more frequently to places that consistently provides the promised product or service promptly and without degradation of value.
Want to get successful in marketing then build reliability and trust.
6. Consider creating a website for your business.
Take amazon.com for example, they couldn’t have done any better if there was no website. Today amazon.com is one of the best marketing platforms in the world. This is because they harnessed this important strategy of marketing… “Creating a business website”.
Creating a website for your business goes a long way to get your business to the public. It also has a way of building better reputation for your business. You can easily get in touch with customers, listen to their views and improve.
What you want to do is to create great content that answers the questions of your clientele. Your website should be structured in such a way that you can always get back to your visitors. By this I mean creating a proper contact us page through which you can easily be contacted either by emailing or messaging.
Then you must create great content for your site because this provides valuable information as to what your clients get when they work with you. Your website content could range from free information in the form of web content, articles, blogs, email newsletters, audios and videos. Trust me, you don’t want to be stingy with your information. Get it all out, don’t hold back your best stuff. Remember, what your clients hire is your expertise and ability to produce results. So you want to give it all out so they are convinced that you’re equal to the task.
But most importantly create a means of get-back-to-customers. It could range from a pop up menu after loading your website offering visitors some more information while requesting for their email addresses to a pop up menu displaying the address of your business premises and requesting they visit you over the weekend. If you don’t have the coding capacity to do these things you can consider hiring a website developer to help you out.
Creating content for your site never stops until you close your business. Just create anything that gives your audience more insight about what you do. You don’t have to make all the research in the world. Just keep it simple but proficient. When creating your content you could ask yourself
- What message you want to pass across
- Who you want to impress (target audience)
- How many leads you can create from this content?
This questions are great to get you started in creating a content that really makes impact. Then your content could range from a story of how you started your business, your challenges, your inspirations even to your experience during the past weeks of business. You know! Anything that could add value to your customers.
7. Efficiency in communication
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| Communication is the key of marketing. |
Marketing is 100% communication and this implies that verbal interactions with your clientele is a very important part of the marketing strategies.
They say, the better you know your audience, the better you (& your team) can appeal to their interests. Well, that holds true as long as marketing is concerned. All fruitful marketing effort begin with in-depth understanding of your audience. Take a look at the following questions…what challenges are your clients facing, have there been any efforts as to tackle it, what worked and what didn’t, and how can you proffer a lasting solution to those challenges. You see how ideal it is to get the answer to the above questions without marketing communication. Trust me without answers to these question there will be no efficient and effective marketing. So to market effective and efficiently, you should consider improving your communication skills.
The four basic communication skills are reading, writing, listening and speaking. But when it comes to direct marketing it balls down to these essential marketing communication skills which are listening and speaking. So mastering these skills “listening and speaking” is a quantum leap to efficient and efficient marketing.
During your marketing conversations, you want to be interested more than sound interesting. You don’t have to do all the talking (speaking) rather do more of the listening. When speaking you want to sound interesting and spice up the whole thing. That’s great, but one thing is for sure you are simply trying hard to sell rather than help them buy. Listening to your clients keeps you interested and makes them feel understood. Start your conversation by asking questions that will get them talking about what their real wants are, where they’ve been, how they were treated and what resulted from the transaction. It is only after you’ve sought first to understand through efficient listening that the solution which of course you will proffer or suggest through speaking will be understood and implemented effectively.
Many independent professionals and beginners really struggle with this aspect of marketing. They don’t see how anyone they walk up to with the right market communication strategy and approach could be a potential buyer. You can never know that if you stay hidden in your cocoon. So if you are in this class what you need is a marketing message. Think of it as that first thing you tell the big guy staring at what a person is standing before him that makes him want to calm down and give you a listening ear or better still answer your questions. Your marketing message is the first thing you communicate to your prospective clients. It is intended to get the attention of your client, generate interest and get your prospect to respond and find out more about your business. Regrettably, not every marketing message accomplish the above.
Take these steps to create a marketing message that works best for you.
Polite and confident introduction: your introduction matters a lot to your client. You want to be very confident, polite and straight to the point. Consider an employee working for Leofinancz companies trying to introduce what we do to a client. A confident and polite introduction would be
“Hello, am Maureen I work for Leofinancz companies I would like to briefly share with you what we do and how we can add value to your business”
That introduction would most likely get a yes and you can take it up from there. Remember to keep your introduction polite and simple.
Discover your client’s problem: After your introduction and explaining what exactly your business is all about, the next step will be to discover your client’s problem. Now you want to ask questions that will make your client want to tell you what problems his business is facing currently. Maureen could ask them to tell her about their businesses too, while she listen carefully for the problem. If she doesn’t get the bug clearly, she could try asking a couple of questions from “what challenges they have faced in their years as business persons” to “how many times they have tried getting a futile solution and then why”. This are great questions that can get your client to share their problems with you and that’s exactly what any great marketer wants because the more you communicate, the more the relationship and trust builds. When they’ve generated enough interest and trust in you and your services the prospect may become ready to explore working with you. That's when marketing transitions into selling.
Proffer or suggest a solution: Now you’ve got their attention and trust it’s the perfect time to make the killing. Go on to suggest a genuine solution at this point you are both connected and chances are that you’re on for a sale.Show Proof: you could show your customers case studies of happy clients whom have used your services. Showing them proof of your capability in your said profession goes a long way to shorten the decision making process.
Conclusively, I call these the 4p’s for creating efficient and effective marketing massage. Polite introduction, discover the problem, proffer a solution and show your proof.
8. Provide your clientele with Exceptional offers and outshine your competitors.
Creating exceptional offers for your clients is a great way to speed up their decision making process. You don’t want anything that scares them away from making the decision so you locate and terminate. You could find out what your competitors are doing, their strengths and weaknesses and figure out way to outshine them. Exceptional offers could range from a money back guarantee to lower prices for your services. You can also offer to provide clients with door step delivery services and the likes of which will help them reach their decisions easily.
Hope you learned a lot from this post. Hit the subscribe button above and never miss another post from this blog. Also remember to implement this strategies of marketing as that is the only way I can assure your success.
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