REMEMBER

Marketing isn't about talking to your customers; it's about talking with them. Marketing relies on two-way communication between your business and your buyer.

Seeing the Big Picture

If you could get an aerial view of the marketing process, it would look like Figure 1-1. Marketing is a nonstop cycle. It begins with customer knowledge and goes round to customer service before it begins all over again. Along the way, it involves product development, pricing, packaging, distribution, advertising and promotion, and all the steps involved in making the sale and serving the customer well.

The marketing wheel of fortune

Every successful marketing program - whether for a billion-dollar business or a hardworking individual - 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 round 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 actions you take:

1. Get to know your target customer and your marketing environment. 2. Tailor your product, pricing, packaging, and distribution strategies to address your customers' needs, your market environment, and the competitive realities of your business. 3. Create and project marketing messages to grab attention, inspire interest, and move your prospects to buying decisions. 4. Go for and close the sale - but don't stop there. 5. Once the sale is made, begin the customer-service phase. Work to ensure customer satisfaction so that you convert the initial sale into repeat business and word-of-mouth advertising for your business. 6. Talk with customers to gain input about their wants and needs and your products and services. Combine what you learn with other research about your market and competitive environment and use your findings to fine-tune your product, pricing, packaging, distribution, promotional messages, sales, and service.

And so the marketing process goes round and round.

REMEMBER

In marketing, there are no shortcuts. You can't just jump to the sale, or even to the advertising stage. To build a successful business, you need to follow every step in the marketing cycle, and that's what the rest of the chapters are all about.

Marketing and sales are not synonymous

People confuse the terms marketing and sales. They think that marketing is a high-powered or dressed-up way to say sales. Or they mesh the two words together into a single solution that they call marketing and sales.

REMEMBER

Selling is one of the ways you communicate your marketing message. Sales is the point at which the product is offered, the case is made, the purchasing decision occurs, and the business-to-customer exchange takes place.

Selling is an important part of the marketing process, but it is not and never can be a replacement for it.

WARNING!

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

Jumpstarting Your Marketing Program

Business owners clear their calendars for the topic of marketing typically at three predictable moments:

Your business is likely in the midst of one of those three situations right now. As you prepare to kick your marketing efforts into high gear, flip back a page or two and remind yourself that marketing isn't just about selling. It's about attracting customers with good products and strong marketing communications, and then it's about keeping customers with products and services that don't just meet but far exceed their expectations. As part of the reward, you win repeat business, loyalty, and new customer referrals.

Marketing a start-up business

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

TIP

Before sending messages into the marketplace, know your answers to these questions:

EXAMPLE

A business setting out to serve corporate clients would hardly want to announce itself by placing free flyers in the grocery store entrance. It needs to present a much more exclusive, professional image than that, probably introducing itself through personal presentations or via letters on high-quality stationery accompanied by a credibility-building business brochure.

On the other end of the spectrum, a start-up aiming to win business from cost-conscious customers probably wouldn't want to introduce itself using full-page, full-color ads, because prospects would likely interpret such an investment as an indication that the advertiser's fees are outside the range of their small budgets.

To get your business image started on a strong marketing footing, define your target customer's profile and then project communications capable of attracting that person's awareness and prompting the feeling that, "Hey, this sounds like something for me."

Pay special attention to the chapters in Part I of this book. They can help you identify your customers, determine price and present your product, size up your competition, set your goals and objectives, establish your market position and brand, and create marketing messages that talk to the right prospects with the right messages.

If you haven't already settled on your business name, see Chapter 20.

Marketing to grow your business

Established businesses grow their revenues by following one of two main routes:

Almost always, the smartest route is to look inside your business first, work to shore up your product and service offerings, and strengthen your existing customer satisfaction and spending levels before trying to win new prospects into your clientele. Part V of this book offers a complete game plan to follow.

Scaling your program to meet your goal

Whether you're launching a new business or accelerating growth of an existing enterprise, start by defining what you're trying to achieve.

Too often, small business owners feel overwhelmed by uncertainty over the scope of the marketing task. They aren't sure how much money they should dedicate to the effort, whether they need to hire marketing professionals, and whether to create ads, brochures, and Web sites. They may have all kinds of other questions that get in the way of forward motion. And they delay launching their marketing efforts as a result.

Here's the solution: Rather than worry about the tools you need to do the job, first put the task in perspective by focusing on what it is you're trying to accomplish. Ask yourself:

EXAMPLE

A social service agency might set a goal to raise $100,000 in donor funds. An accounting firm might want to attract six corporate clients. A retailer might want to build an additional $50,000 in sales. A doctor might want to attract 100 patients for a particular new service. A weekly newspaper might want to gain 500 new subscribers.

By setting your goal first (more on this important step in Chapter 5), the process of creating your marketing plan (see Chapter 22 for how to write a plan in ten easy steps) becomes a focused, goal-oriented, and vastly easier activity.

How Small Business Marketing Is Different

All marketing programs need to follow the same marketing process, but the similarities between big business and small business marketing stop there. Budgets, staffing, creative approaches, and communication techniques vary hugely between an international mega-marketer like, say, Coca-Cola, and a comparatively micro-budget marketer like, well, like you.

This book is for you. Here's why.

Dollar differences

As a small business, 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 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 puts responsibility for marketing in the very top box, where the owner, in the essential role, oversees the process 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 cost involved in creating and running the ad in the first place. The balancing act, discussed in Part III of this book, is to create consistency in your marketing communications so that they build a clear brand identity while at the same time inspiring the necessary consumer action to deliver sales - now.

Strategic differences

In big businesses, bound copies of business plans grace every bookshelf, whereas in many small businesses, the very term marketing plan provokes a guilt pang. If you just felt this typical reaction, turn to Chapter 22 for the antidote. It provides an outline for putting your plan in writing - without any mysterious jargon and with advice and examples scaled specifically to small businesses like yours.

TIP

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, then 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 research into getting to know and understand their customers. Meanwhile, you can talk with your customers face to face, day after day, at virtually no additional cost at all.

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

Making Marketing Your Key to Success

How many times have you heard small-business people say that they just don't have time for marketing?

Think of it this way. It's the simple truth that without customers, a business is out of business. Because marketing is the process by which your business gets and keeps customers, that means marketing is the key to keeping your business in business.

Put in terms like that, marketing is the single most important activity in any business - including yours. The fact that you're holding this book means you've made a commitment, and that gives you an edge over many of your competitors. Go for it!

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from Small Business Marketing For Dummies by Barbara Findlay Schenck Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---