Overview

Marketing can be broken down into two main areas: Identifying your customer, and positioning your company. In this book we'll walk through both to make sure you're marketing your company to the right people in the right way. Then we'll examine some of the channels you can use to communicate your message as effectively as possible.

Identifying Your Customer

In the first section of this book you'll select a target market and develop a detailed profile of your ideal customer. You'll discover where that person lives, along with his or her family status, occupation, income, lifestyle, buying preferences, and so forth. If your ideal customer is another business, you'll learn about the individual responsible for making the buying decisions, as well as about the business itself.

Positioning Your Company

Once you have a greater understanding of who your customers are, you'll begin to focus your business on satisfying their particular needs or wants. Your sales department will be customer driven, as well as your entire business. You'll enhance your understanding of your brand, your unique selling position and your corporate image. To this end, you'll develop a clear and unique marketing position for your company, and a comprehensive marketing strategy for its implementation.

But What About Sales?

Of course sales are important. Your business cannot exist without them. But the moment that the growth of a business exceeds its ability to handle that growth, it begins the rapid process of burnout. As necessary as growth is, it can kill a business with lightning speed that's not prepared for it.

So unless sales are your main challenge, your strategy is to get your business in order first, and then focus on sales. Once your business is organized, growth will come more quickly, more naturally and more consistently than ever before.

Corporate Culture and Your Marketing Department

We discussed the concept of corporate culture in Management - The Art & Science of Getting Things Done. A lot of people think of corporate culture as simply cultivating "warm fuzzy" feelings among your employees. While there's often an intangible aspect to corporate culture, by no means is it limited to your internal operations, or something that is outside of your control. Building a business where all team members are consciously improving every day, all of them pulling on the oars together has hundreds of positive effects. One of those effects is it creates positive and shareable stories. Being a great place to work is in an of itself a fantastic story your Marketing department can leverage to positive effect. It's well known that happy employees create better products, give better customer service and generally deliver higher value.

As we move through Marketing - Standing Out From The Crowd, we'll be focusing on your defining your Target Market, and then positioning your company to fill its needs. As you build the systems that you and your employees will use to fulfill your marketing objectives, keep your corporate culture in the front of your mind. You work hard to develop an excellent corporate culture, ensure your marketing systems capitalize on your hard work.

Lead Generation

Here you will build the systems you need to create a steady stream of qualified leads by delivering the right message to the right people at the right time.