What are the basics of marketing?
Rory Sutherland, Vice-Chairman of Ogilvy, puts it best when he says âmarketing is the lens of the customer in your organisationâ. That means to say marketing is an attitude as much as it is an activity, and it is far broader than just promotion and advertising – itâs everything your customer can see, touch or interact within your business.Â
Three stages
Mark Ritson, Professor of Marketing, puts marketing into three buckets, each of which deserves time and attention.Â
These buckets are: market orientation, strategy, and tactics. Here, weâll explain each, giving you a reference point on how to build out your own marketing activities.Â
Market Orientation
Market orientation is the first thing you should do before even having a product. Simply put, in this stage youâre looking to understand the pains, needs and desires of the market you have chosen.Â
To find out these needs, pains and wants, you can ask people, observe what they say on social media, or more formally do things such as bring together a focus group to ask questions.Â
Essentially, you are looking to get to a place where youâre able to identify all those âdonât you hate it whenâŠâ or âI would love it ifâŠâ moments your potential customers have.Â
Market orientation is always the bit people miss or skip over, but by having an understanding of what the market wants, youâre able to create a product and use language to advertise it that matter to the customer, rather than just mattering to you.
Strategy
Now you have an understanding of what the market wants, youâre able to start developing a strategy to match. Simply put, this strategy dictates things like the audience you are targeting, tone of voice, key messages, what your brand will sound like and other elements which will stay consistent over the course of time, even if your tactics change.Â
Here, target audience is perhaps the most important as if you are saying your audience is âeveryoneâ, what youâre actually saying is your audience is âno oneâ because your message will be so broad, it wonât resonate with anyone.Â
One tool that is worth considering is developing a âpersonaâ. Here, you create a fictional version of your target audience, almost as if theyâre in the room there with you. The advantage here is you are then able to go back to the persona with every decision you make and ask the question âwill this thing I am doing benefit <persona name>?â
For more on creating personas, there is a great resource here: https://www.hubspot.com/make-my-persona
Once you have created your persona, everything else quite simply begins to fall out of this version of your target audience, including tone of voice, the messages that will resonate and more.Â
Tactics
This is the bit everyone rushes to, but will ultimately fall flat if you havenât done the groundwork upfront in the orientation and strategy stages.Â
The simplest way to evaluate this upfront is the 4Ps, although there is many nuances once you get cracking.Â
First, product – finally weâre defining what we sell. The product is a solution to the problems discovered in the orientation stage.Â
Second, price. Here, youâre looking for the right price for the market. With enough understanding of the problem you are solving and the financial position of your customers, price should fall out fairly quickly, too.Â
Third, place. Where do you want your product to be consumed? Are you online only, in person, on the move? All these things will contribute to how customer will interact with your company.Â
Finally, promotion. At this stage, itâs worth stopping to dedicate a little time to this section.Â
Promotion
First, itâs better to stop thinking about marketing as digital marketing vs old fashioned marketing. If youâre solving the needs of the customer – youâre marketing.Â
Promotion is the process of advertising or communicating what your product or service is about to the customer. Itâs also the bit where everyone says âmy cousin has told me to start on Facebook, so I think we should do thatâ.Â
When youâre planning on doing your promotion, try splitting up your activity into five stages:Â
- Awareness – Making someone aware of your product
- Consideration – Making someone who is potentially interested in your product, move to purchase
- Purchase – Making the purchase process as easy as possible
- Retention – Keeping the customers you have, rather than having to keep on finding new ones
- Advocacy – Turning your current customers into your biggest fans
This is useful because when youâre looking to start your activity, itâs important to not just do stuff, itâs important to do it with purpose. The above five steps provide the âwith purposeâ bit.Â
There is a multitude of ways to promote your business, and no ârightâ answer on the mix of channels that make up your strategy. The only answer that is right is whatever suits your audience. However, by doing the orientation and strategy stages, youâre far more likely to know exactly what these channels are.Â
Measurement
Finally, there has to be a word put in the direction of measurement.Â
Itâs no good chucking ÂŁ100 at something and hoping it will work. Instead, take a moment to consider what you would like out of any of your marketing activities, and then plan how you can measure the success of this.Â
Ultimately, itâs all about understanding what works in terms of hitting the goals you set, and doing more of that, and doing less of what doesnât.