Marketing and Advertising your business is one of the most important topics one must consider when starting any kind of business.
Unlike strictly technical topics, such as building a website, SMC and eMC can only do so much of this task for you. Actually performing the marketing and advertising of a business is something you should do yourself. It is important to market your business with your own style, or “flavor.” Having another person, or company, do these important tasks for you takes away from your company’s uniqueness.
Marketing is not a task one should rush in to. Take some time and carefully plan your actions well before you start performing your actions.
To this end, the most important step you can take in marketing your business is to write a marketing plan. According to www.wikipedia.org, a Marketing Plan is a written document that details the actions necessary to achieve a specified marketing objective. To learn more about this wonderful treasure map, see our article on them here: Marketing Plan.
Part of writing your marketing plan, or just deciding what kind of marketing and advertising to do, will be to discover who your customers are going to be. This is called “finding your target market.” A target market is important because it helps you decide who you will sell your products to.
Many people running their first (or second) business may believe that the best target customer is “everyone.” This is a very bad trap to fall in to.
Successful marketing is designed to be effective on one or more target groups, rather than trying to appeal to too broad a base of customers.
Think about the most effective marketing you have seen – something that made you buy the product or service very soon after seeing the ad, or an ad that made you feel very strong emotions about a product. Another person won’t feel the same emotional response you do – they may even hate the ad. But the ad worked on you, which is what made it effective.
The marketing company created a targeted piece of advertising that works very effectively on a target percentage of the population, including you. This the way you want to reach people – a piece of advertising that draws a potent emotional response from the recipient; and know, going in, that not everyone will feel the same way about the advertising.
Somewhere out there is another ad, maybe even for the same product, that will have the other person buying it, even though you think the new ad stinks.
Target Marketing reference
About.com has specific articles on Target Marketing.
http://marketing.about.com/od/targketmarketing/
Wikipedia.org has an article on Target Marketing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Target_market
The U.S. Government has some advice on Target Marketing:
http://www.business.gov/phases/managing/market_price/target_marketing.html
Once you have a target market chosen, and a marketing plan written, the next step is to exercise your marketing plan.
By now, you should know what kind of customer you plan on appealing to, and what methods of marketing you will use to reach them. There are types of marketing other than Target Marketing – Niche Marketing and a variety of other marketing types have proven to be very successful.
Learn more on the Marketing your SMC/eMC business topic