That’s right, the magical, mystical, marketing mystery solved in 4 easy to understand functions.

Step 1. Research:

Get to know your product, customer, and competitors. I’m not talking about multi-million dollar focus groups and surveys. Simple will work for most companies.

Start here:

Products – know the benefits of your features

Customers – know who they are and what they need or want

Competitors – know who they are, what makes you different and what their pricing points are.

Step 2. Marketing Action:

Chose marketing activities that you can do on a “consistent” basis. Blogging not your thing? Video blog or just use your voice for a podcast. Have money burning a hole in your pocket, radio, tv, or print. There are hundreds of marketing actions you can do the trick is picking ones that you’ll do consistently.

Step 3. Measure:

Make sure that you have valid ways to measure the results of your marketing activities. How many inquires did your marketing activity generate? How many of the inquiries turned into qualified leads?

Measure everything you can. If it’s easy to measure, do it, you may want the data later. If you can’t come up with a way to measure the effectiveness of your marketing effort, pick a different one.

Step 4. Analyze:

Look at your measurements, did the inquires convert to leads? Did the leads convert to sales? If so, at what percentage. What was your ROI (Return on investment). For the ones that didn’t convert, do you know why. Testing your results this way is the absolute key to marketing success. Without this step you’re just guessing.

This is also why I didn’t go into perfecting the method of marketing you chose in step 2. Part of the over all process is making sure you know how well your marketing activities are working (or not working) and improving upon them based on the results.

–> REPEAT

Now just “Repeat” this process improving the quality of your marketing actions until you get the results you want.

I know I’ve oversimplified an entire industry in just a few words but it’s truly this simple. The beauty of acknowledging that this works and trying it lies in the shear power  you get from consistently improving and marketing your business.

You Ask “Ron, if it’s this simple why isn’t everyone doing it?” Because we are so self-centered on our own likes and desires that we fail to realize that often we are different then our target customer. Don’t get me started on how many people call me or stop by my office to voice some hair brained marketing stunt hoping I’ll validate it.   Or, how many times I review a website to find that it appealed only to the business owner not their target market.

Most business owners are so stuck on their own likes and dislikes that they fail to measure and analyze the results of their efforts…

Let’s review the process. Research – know who you are, what you offer, who you offer it to and who else is offering a similar item . Action – Consistent marketing efforts that we can Measure (don’t waste time on unmeasurable actions). Analyze the results looking for ways to improve your effectiveness and repeat with the new and improved.

I’ll write more about each of the steps in the coming days. First subject, Simple research you should start with.

Share