Marketing is about knowing what your customer wants and needs, knowing how you can connect with them and knowing how you can be their first choice. It's not easy.
There are dozens of common marketing methods and many of them are expensive. Some will work for your business and some won’t. Marketing can be a bottomless money pit and measuring the results of your marketing efforts is important so that you know what is working and what isn’t.
But even once you’ve mastered your marketing strategy and have gained someone’s express interest in your product or service, there’s more work to be done. This is where you transition into the ‘sales’ phase. You need to let your prospective customer understand the value of what you offer and convince them to spend their money. This is likely to be a more personalised process – answering questions, sending estimates, offering deals and formalising contracts.
Once you have a spending customer, it is up to you to keep your connection live or risk losing them. The key is to engage your customer – make them a fan of your business. An engaged customer will come back, will talk to others about your business and will feed back to you. For most businesses it is easier to attract customers back than to attract new customers.
Done well, your marketing will attract more interest, your sales process will maximise the conversion rate of potential customers to actual customers, and the results of your marketing and sales costs will be obvious.
You always need to rescope your marketing strategy. Something might work for a while and then stop working, new marketing trends or products might come to the fore, or you might find that there is another customer group you want to attract who require a different approach.
With marketing, always be open to experimentation, but make sure you can track the results so you know if your investment is paying off.
We recommend reading this short guide to marketing, written by ENC’s growth advisor, Guy Graham: Guy’s Guide to Marketing
