| Marketing is the most important task a company can undertake it is also one of the darkest arts of the consultant! | What we use is the simple approach of segmentation |
| What are the stages of marketing? | Initially a start up company begins with the elephant gun approach - selling anything to anyone that will listen. But as you client base grows if you take the time to interact with them you begin to better understand who they, what they want from you and how best to attract more like minded customers. Make no mistake, marketing is about being able to sell better to new and existing clients, here's the tricky part, it has absolutely nothing to do with selling. |
| Then what? | As you begin to understand you customers more, you begin to use your capital - that is time, knowledge and money - not just money - more effectively so when using your elephant gun never spend too much capital on one idea even if you think it is best in world. Guess what? this is simple, but that normally means it is also hard work. For example where we make our money is from two typical types of client, one is the small business with 20-40 employees who want some sytems documenting to fit a certain requirement and a little support further down the line. They are what we would call typical "hobby" businesses. The owners might be reasonably wealthy, but not rich and since they are comfortable why work harder than they do already (and most of them do work very hard). Part of working smart is knowing when and where to work. Once you understand where to shoot your gun you can move to a rifle, then a sniper and finally you will be able to walk straight up to your target and shoot with a handgun. |
So what do good companies do? |
The
successful businesses we work with, we spend perhaps a
day a week or every two weeks. The initial conversation
starts the same way they appear very simple questions at
first, if you feel this is to simplistic, you are missing
the point:
What do you sell? And so it continues We do not deride our "hobby" clients since their comfort is enough. They will never be seriously wealthy, but they are not prepared to "get out of the box" to make the difference. If this were all easy, anyone could do it, but the world doesn't work like that. Ask yourself, how badly do you really want to be successful? What are you prepared to sacrifice in order to achieve your dreams? How uncomfortable in the short run can you accept to be in order to reach those dreams? These are tough lessons to learn, just ask me, but I'm writing this, and I have a lot of very happy customers, I still write copy but only where I know exactly who would read it, what I will get from it, where my upside lies...... The whole point is more thinking about it - your intellectual capital - and less doing about it - your precious money and time - reaps more rewards in the long run. |
| So what now? | Getting to those answers should not be carried out haphazardly - this is a waste of effort again. Contact us to discuss how we can put together a marketing plan together, not an advertising plan, but a marketing plan. Then we can work to move you a lot closer to your dreams a lot faster than you thought you ever could. |