Marketing 101 For Small Businesses

Marketing, in my opinion, is not simply the act of selling the product to a customer but is the definition and backbone of the total effort of the company.  Marketing defines the attributes of the customer and how the customer will be reached so that time and money are not wasted.  Marketing looks for the value added of the company that can be sold to the customer.  Marketing outlines the business flow of customers through various areas of the business.  Marketing can determine the vision and direction of the company.

Good marketing is the difference between being miserable and disheartened, and being energized with a lot of activity.  You are selling to the right people who want to hear your message.  People are making their way through the marketing process, hearing the sales presentation, buying product or signing up as distributors.  Poor marketing practice is like cold-calling the phone book.  It's beating your head against a brick wall and never getting anywhere.  If you are a new multi-level marketer, you have probably felt this way many times.

So how do you market well?  You need to find the right types of people for your product or opportunity.  Are you selling widgets?  Who uses widgets?  Do men or women usually buy widgets?  Are widgets purchased by everyone or just certain income levels?  Are people more likely to buy widgets in a certain part of the country or world?  Are office workers more likely to buy widgets than blue collar workers?  These are the kinds of questions you need to ask about your product in order to build a profile of your customer.

For an opportunity that sells widgets, you probably want your customer for widgets plus a few other elements.  For instance, are store owners likely to want to sell widgets?  Are widgets best sold by personal sales people?  Does being a distributor for widgets offer a discount for purchases?  These questions can define which of your customers you may want to offer the opportunity to, or the kind of people you want to find for your opportunity.

I have described this before as creating a demographic profile.  Demographics define a subset of the population.  A given person usually fits within a group or several groups.  Perhaps your demographic profile describes only 10% of the population so 90% of the population typically would not be interested in what you are offering.  If you make your offer to the correct 10% of the population, not all will buy but they are considerably more likely to be interested.  This makes business fun, to be presenting to people who want to be presented to.

Marketing also defines your advertising methods, sales messages, and what values your business offers to your customers.  Marketing as a whole may be a process of trial and error, but once you find what works for you, you just do it over and over and bigger and bigger.  Larger companies try to get more precise with their marketing activities by doing a ton of research before ever delivering a product to market, but since we don't have a major amount of resources or time, doing things small in a trial and error fashion works fine.