Market This!: An Effective 90-Day Marketing Tool

By Sherry Prescott-Willis

Think you're ready to market your product or service--think again..don't take another step until you read this book! Most marketing books give you a formula for how to market your stuff, or they give you ideas, sometimes really good ones, on how to do it. But no one actually helps you set up a marketing plan that works for you. This book is different. It helps you formulate an actual marketing plan, based on what your customers think and feel. It's interactive, and it teaches you how to mine information so you really do find out what your customers are thinking. This book gives you the opportunity to make smarter, more effective decisions about your marketing. You can make smart marketing decisions. You can be an effective marketer. You can be a savvy marketer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Mar 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781614480242

Book preview

PART I

Introduction — Evaluating Your Business

IN THIS PART, YOU WILL LEARN why evaluating your business before you do a marketing plan is so important. You will also be introduced to how this book is set up and learn how you can use it to maximize success in your own business. Next you will find an overview and definition of marketing and business plans and learn why and how companies use them.

Chapter

1

Introduction

congratulations! I’m excited for you because you’ve picked up my book, and you are interested in becoming a savvy marketer. You want to market something, and you want to do it right. This means you have a business or are part of a business and you have a product or service about which you want to get the word out. You may even be thinking about ways to begin planning some marketing activities for your business. You want to market something, and you want to take the right path.

You may have visions of what type of marketing you’d like to do—perhaps a website launch or a great advertising campaign; possibly you’ve considered an integrated email campaign. Maybe you’re not sure what type of marketing activity you should do next and need some ideas. In any case, you’re thinking hard about marketing. Well, good for you, but a word of advice—before you begin scratching out marketing activities and skipping ahead to the marketing template plan at the end of the book, I recommend that you stop a moment. Before you jump into any plan or invest in any marketing activity, read through the chapters and do the exercises in this book. Trust me, you’ll be thanking me later.

Why listen to me? Well, I am a high-tech and consumer marketer with over 18 years of product and strategic marketing experience. I’ve worked with Fortune 500 companies, startups, and medium-sized, and non-profit companies doing a variety of marketing planning, launch development, and execution. I’ve worked with VPs of Marketing, and I’ve worked with CEOs, small-business owners, and product engineers. I’ve worked in companies that are on the verge of going public, and I’ve worked with companies that are just starting out from scratch that have no funding and no product! I’ve also worked with consultants, and I’ve been a consultant. In my experience, I’ve seen a lot of products and services marketed!

I wrote this book to help people make good marketing decisions. I want people to feel good about the marketing choices that they make for their businesses. I also wanted to introduce a fun and easy process that allows people to develop effective marketing plans! To get those effective marketing plans created, first and foremost, I know people have to take inventory of their overall business. People should take a step back to gather accurate information on where the business is going and what is happening in the business that is going right and wrong. I am convinced that the difference between a really effective marketing plan and a not so effective marketing plan is the relevant information available to each particular business. To make smart marketing decisions, I want people to have the necessary tools that will allow them to see what stage their business is in and what their customers are really thinking about their product or service.

Throughout my many years in marketing, I continue to see that business owners have difficulty looking at their business with an objective, open mind. This makes it very challenging to make smart decisions about marketing activities. I have witnessed very successful executives spend a lot of money on the wrong marketing activities that have no impact on their customers. I have also witnessed CEOs and VPs of Marketing as they waste away venture capital money on marketing activities that don’t yield results and don’t generate new customers. Tragically, when I think back to the 90s, especially during the high-technology boom, I see that a great deal of money was wasted on marketing programs that didn’t work!

The Importance of Customers in Your Marketing Decisions

Unfortunately, business owners sometimes forget to consider their customers and potential customers when they make marketing decisions. It sounds crazy, but it’s true! I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen a lack of consideration and awareness for how customers are viewing a product or service when it comes to planning marketing activities. Customers’ needs evolve and change. Many business owners think they understand their customers, but they fail to see how their customers’ needs may grow and shift. Events can happen every day to change a customer’s mind. For example, the economy may impact a customer’s decision about the way they typically buy a product or service. Or a management team switch may mean that your product or service may no longer be a priority for a business with new leaders at the helm. Even the addition of a new product or service or change in your own business strategy may no longer meet a customer’s needs. Think about it—without fully understanding what your customers are thinking and wanting, you are challenged to plan meaningful marketing activities that effectively reach out to them.

Your customers seek and purchase your product or service, so their opinion should count first before you plan out your marketing strategies. Their perception of your product or service needs to be an ongoing part of your decisions as you plan out marketing activities. This means you really need to check in with your customers often and make it a point to see what’s happening with how they are viewing your business. Your customers are most important to the success of your business and their perception of your product or service should be a critical component of your marketing decisions! You will learn how to assess what your customers are thinking about your product or services in this book and ask the right questions so that you are attuned with them.

EVALUATING YOUR BUSINESS: Why It’s So Hard, Why It’s So Important

There’s a difference between working on your business and working in your business. Wouldn’t you agree? When you’re knee-deep in the day-to-day tasks of running your business or managing some part of your business, you are working within your business. You’re busy! You don’t have time to think about a lot of things besides driving the business. It’s easy to get wrapped up in all the millions of tasks at hand like making payroll, managing your employees, selling your product or service, making sure your product works, and more. With all the many things that have to happen on a daily basis, it’s hard to take a step back to see what’s really happening from a big picture—a twenty thousand-foot level! Yet taking a pause to see what’s really happening is so critical to the success of how you should market effectively to your customers.

To fully appreciate how to market your product or service, you really need to be able to look at your business objectively. What I mean by this is looking to see what is happening overall in your business. Look at all the successes, all the failures and what’s truly happening with your customers. Sometimes marketing the obvious is not so obvious when you’re working on the business! Marketing is also not an easy task when you are running your business and/or inside the business itself. When you can see what is really happening in your business, you have a greater chance of helping it to grow and can make the right marketing decisions moving forward.

In this book, the evaluation work you do will give you the opportunity to evaluate what’s going on in your business. Once you understand this, you will have an easier time making marketing decisions that can move your company in a forward direction. Once you have done this analysis work, you may have a better idea of where it is exactly that you want to go with your company. Many companies struggle with where they want to go because the possibilities appear endless. Sometimes the most natural direction for the company doesn’t seem logical. Or, many times, a company has trouble focusing in on core areas of the business that will generate the most revenue and give them the best opportunity to connect with their customers. In the coming chapter, you’re going to get a great opportunity to pause from your day-to-day work tasks to analyze your business and build an effective marketing plan.

Chapter

2

How You Can Use This Book

this is a book for anyone who is looking for advice on how to market something. That something might be a product or it could be service. You may be a business owner, a CEO, or a marketing manager or executive. Regardless of who you are, and your knowledge of marketing, I promise that the steps you will be guided to take throughout this book will help in your marketing process and save you time and money before you invest in your marketing activities.

Throughout this book I use three business-owner examples to help you see how the interactive exercises can be beneficial for different types and sizes of businesses. These examples cover the following industries: automotive service repair, Human Resources (HR) consulting, and Information Technology (IT) services for small businesses. All of these business owners are at a particular stage in the growth of their business, and each one has a different type of customer. You may find that you identify with one business owner or all of them. One business is in startup mode, while another may have more established customers with a solid product. The way that these business owners approach their customers may vary, but they are all in need of marketing help in some form. Hopefully the business-owner examples used in this book will help you to understand that regardless of your business objectives and the type of product or service that you plan to market, there is great value in taking the time to do some analysis work before you dive into marketing activities.

You can use this book in segments or all at once. My recommendation is to read through each chapter and go through all of the exercises thinking about your own business as you do them. This will help to shed some light on where you are and unlock the code to some unique information that will best influence your customers. Some exercises may prove to be more useful than others, and you may decide that several exercises can be used successfully together while others may not work as well for you. In some cases, you may decide that you will continue to use an exercise repeatedly in the future planning stages of your business and its growth. This is great. All of the exercises can be useful in some way. Different sized businesses have different business needs and varied business models that help them grow and thrive. But all business owners need information to help them make good decisions. The process of gathering the information can be translated into any stage of your business, and the thinking behind these exercises will undoubtedly give you the framework you need to make better marketing decisions.

How This Book Is Organized

This book is a reference tool for you and your business. The content that you read along with the exercises that you complete will give you all the information you need to prepare a solid marketing plan for the next thirty, sixty, and ninety days. The work in this book has been designed to allow you to stop and take a look at your business objectively by listening to what your customers are saying and being aware