Marketing as a Conversation, Part 1

What is marketing?  Marketing is the process of educating people about your products or services. It's how you go about building your brand. It's what takes place before the sale. Marketing is conducting research to learn about your prospects and customers. It's the activity that keeps the company looking to the future rather than focusing just on today.

Marketing is all these things and more, which can make it seem like a difficult and challenging hat for a small business owner to wear; especially if you have limited resources and no formal marketing training.

If you keep in mind that, at its most basic, marketing is a conversation between you and your prospects and customers, it can be an easier task. To create the conversation you need to determine the following:  

·         Determine your ideal customer - those who have a legitimate need for your product or service and have the financial resources to purchase it.

·         Identify your ideal customer's most important challenges, issues and concerns in regards to your product or service.

·         Help them understand how your product/service/solution addresses those concerns better than anyone else while offering the best value for their money.

Do these three things well, and attracting new customers - which is one of the primary goals of marketing - gets a lot easier. Which means you can spend more time actually delivering your product or service and less time struggling to get people interested in it.