Branding your Business

Branding your Business Branding your business is about placing your product, service or the business itself clearly in the minds’ eyes of your target markets. It’s about helping your potential and current customers to build an image of what your business, service or product represents in the market. Ultimately, branding is about making your product …

Target Marketing – Visualise that Persona

Your Target Marketing Personae In Target Marketing, for a business-to-consumer (B2C) enterprise, you should try to paint a picture of a persona that represents the actual real-life market you are hoping to develop. Taking into account factors like family status, number of children, age bracket, income level, motivations, behaviours, etc., you should try to build …

Marketing Research – Step Two of the Marketing Process

The Vital Role of Marketing Research So you’ve carried out your Situation Analysis as the first step in the Marketing Process. Now it’s time for some Marketing Research. Marketing Research is about finding out what you feel you don’t know enough about. That might be competitive offers, potential distribution channels, consumer behaviour, and so on. …

Situation Analysis : The ‘Now’ of Marketing

Situation Analysis – Where Are You At? One of the bigger challenges facing any marketing trainer, like myself, is holding participants’ attention while discussing the role played by what we call “Situation Analysis”. While carrying out a Situation Analysis should be the first step (and then regularly repeated), it can be so much more appealing …

SWOT Analysis – A Valuable Business Tool

Of all the business tools out there, the SWOT Analysis is perhaps the best known. More interesting, perhaps, might be to know how many business owners have ever actually sat down and objectively carried one out! The SWOT Analysis is an integral part of the first stage of the Marketing Process. Knowing the Strengths and Weaknesses …

Marketing Process – The Structure Behind Ideas

The Marketing Process – Your Strategy Play word association with ‘marketing’ and many will respond with ‘advertising’. Others might come up with ‘promoting’, or even offer up ‘Facebook‘ nowadays. Rarely will somebody utter ‘marketing process’. And yet, as small business owners and marketeers, we should be thinking more about the Marketing Process as a whole …

The Value of No

When you’re out there in the market, trying to make sales for your product or service, it’s important to understand the value of no. We’ve all experienced the slog of advancing a potential sale through the so-called ‘sales funnel’, investing time and effort as we go. While many prospects fall off along the way, through …

Product Pricing – 5 Methods

For any small business, product pricing decisions can be among the most difficult. There is often a tendency to price one’s product or service low, in the hope of gaining quick sales, or through fear of rejection by the target market. However, the danger here can be that one prices the product too low. It …

Distribution Agreements – What Are You Looking For?

You may have found a product you’d like to distribute into your market on behalf of its principal (manufacturer or developer). Indeed, you may have developed your own product for which you now need a distributor in new markets. Consider these points when setting out to secure distribution agreements. 1. Density of end-users The higher …

6 Essential Elements of a Sales Letter

6 Essential Elements of a Sales Letter A sales letter (or email) is just one of many promotional actions you will take and, recalling that no single action will suffice, it is first important to be clear on the strategy behind it and its place among your many marketing actions. Have you clearly identified your …