Everyday Marketing Ideas

Marketing Basics – Do You Really Need to Market Your Business?

First, let’s start with a definition. What is Marketing? Marketing is the process of defining, understanding, and then systematically promoting yourself and your products to your target market in a way that converts into sales of your products or services. Does that sound intimidating?

Here’s a better definition: marketing is how you reach the people that you can help, then share with them how you can help them and give them the opportunity to allow you to help. See, that’s not scary at all. When you define it this way it actually sounds good, right? You want to help people by providing products or services that solve their problems!

Three important steps:

1) You’ve got to understand who your market is and what they need.

You need to take time to think about what their problem is that you can help solve. You need to know the value you provide to your customers so that you can confidently price and promote your products.

2) You need a systematic way to get the details about your product or services in front of the people who need it.

It needs to be systematic because a one-time approach rarely works. How do you figure out what methods to use to reach the people you can help? It depends on your business, your target market, and your personality. Marketing has to be something that you plan out and keep doing.

3) Your marketing needs to convert to sales. If it’s not, you need to go back to step one and start again.

Tip: As you work on your marketing plan, gather a list of the marketing strategies and tactics you’ve tried already. Make a note for yourself of whether it’s worked great, worked some, didn’t work at all, or if you aren’t sure whether it worked or not. Use this to help you decide what’s worth continuing to spend time on and what’s not.

Marketing is not just placing an ad or sending out a newsletter once or twice. It’s more than that. If you skip straight to that without first defining and understanding your market, you won’t be nearly as successful (and you’ll probably waste lots of time and money by throwing your marketing at the wrong people).

If you want to get your products or services to the people you can help, then yes, you do really need to market your business!

Michelle Shaeffer, The Small Business Muse, publishes The Muses Brainstorm, a weekly ezine with tips to help you balance, manage, and market your home based business. With your subscription you’ll also receive access to free gifts including 101+ Free/Cheap Ways to Market Your Business, 119 Things You Can Outsource, and more. If you’re ready for inspirational guidance and bright ideas sign up free at http://www.thesmallbusinessmuse.com.