Marketing 101: Basics of a Good Strategy
Marketing strategies help provide direction to your company. You can build them with new-age tools or take a more traditional approach. Whichever way you go, the basics of marketing remain the same.
Three of the most important marketing basics are defining your target market, value proposition, and building a profitable customer relationship.
Marketing 101: Target customer base
Knowing who your target market is, helps you market more efficiently. You can define them by segmenting a portion of the market which you want to serve. Once you’ve established a profile of the people who will be using your product or service, you can tailor your marketing activity accordingly.
Red Bull’s target audience is ambitious, single people between the ages of 16 and 30 who don’t live at home. They’ve reached out to them directly by getting involved in college parties, bars, sporting events, music festivals and other places where young people hang out. Red Bull is great at effectively focusing their marketing because of their narrowly defined target market.
Marketing 101: Value proposition
Every business offers some unique value to their customers. But the only way customers know you have something to offer is if you position that value. You can do that by differentiating it from the competition and delivering maximum value.
Use your competitive advantage to help your product stand out from the rest. Why do more people prefer Apple over other smartphones? According to a report, it’s because they feel Apple is more “smart, fun and sleek.” Apple has positioned those values to their target market, and because they are important to consumers, it commands 50% of the global smartphone market today.
Marketing 101: Customer relationships
Your marketing work doesn’t end once you land a customer. Rather you enter a totally new realm of business management. Known as Customer Relationship Management (CRM), it aims to maximize customer loyalty.
Through a process of managing customer information and providing good experiences at every customer touchpoint, CRM brings customers back for more. However, be sure to be ethical and transparent about the collection of data. Otherwise, you might find yourself in a Facebook-Cambridge Analytica situation yourself.