Marketing is not Promotion People – Get that in Your Heads.

Promotion and Advertising are tools used within a Marketing programme when a product or service is ready to be launched. There’s lots of marketing needs to be done before that stage  though.

There are so many people around claiming to be marketing experts because they’ve undertaken promotional actions to some degree of success – that doesn’t make you a marketing guru that makes you a promotions guru.

Marketing is much more than just promoting products – it’s researching markets, identifying opportunities and problems, developing services and products to solve those problems in a manner a customer would like  setting up and testing Marketing campaigns, using above the line-, below the line- and digital- methods to formulate, execute and analyse the success of each actitivy, something that is particularly easy online given the availability of data, constantly testing and refining promotions as needed. And eventually, the product is ready to go, hopefuly with a well-armed knowledge of the new market that will allow him or her to dominate.

Market Research

A true Marketer knows that any product needs research prior to committing, here are just 15:

  1. What’s the size of the market?
  2. Who are the major players?
  3. How competitive is it?
  4. Have you done any Keyword Research?
  5. What’s the customer profile?
  6. What are people in the market desperate for?
  7. Are there any problems there you can solve through your product or service?
  8. Are you asking people in the market if they see a place for your product?
  9. Would they buy it or try it out and give it a mark out of 100 for you??
  10. Are you doing usability studies?
  11. What’s the best way to reach your target consumers? It’s not always going to be online, many niches can found away from the computer.
  12. What are the best factors to identify in order to do competitive analysis? Price, Features, Quality, Exclusivity – they’ll be different  for each market
  13. Does your product represent what you want to sell to them, or what they want to buy from you?
  14. How could you change the former into the latter?
  15. Where can your potential customers be found?

Next time, I’ll look at competitive positioning and discuss how understanding a fairly simple topic to grasp can help you know more about your market than most others