Strategic Marketing (1)
Marketing is a very serious activity and it is the fundamental part of every business. It is your ability to win in the marketplace that makes you a true business winner. Most business failures known to me are mainly those relating to the market or marketing.
The subject of marketing is becoming harder as the competition is becoming fierce. ‘If you don’t have a competitive advantage’, Jack Welch warned, ‘don’t compete’. And my finest advice is: go strategic and if you would grab the best market-share. If there’s one thing people strive for in the marketing; it’s to be understood – an understanding (between the buyer and the seller) that would lead to closing a deal. Yet that purpose has not been achieved by many marketers and business owners.
Each business day opens us up to other sides of marketing or the market that we possibly may not have thought of before now. I didn’t know about marketing before as much as I know now but the experience came with time and constant exposure. And if we fail to adapt quickly to current marketing challenges, we might be out of business tomorrow. So, we have to deal with the marketing situations the way they are, and not the way we wished they should be.
Marketing like business is a game of strategy. John Collins saw it may years ago and remarked, ‘Competing in the market place is like war. You have injuries and casualties, and the best strategy wins’. Interestingly, strategies are worked out based on the market realities. You can’t win in a game you haven’t defined well with facts. Do you?
I don’t know the size of your present market-share but there are more out there for grabs than what you have in your kitty at the moment. The heart of this piece of writing is to find ways of converting your prospective buyers to becoming true buyers, who would always be buying time and time again until their loyalties are established. How then do we device a strategy to convert and add prospects into your existing customer-base? This is what this work would focus on in a nutshell.
Marketing: another definition
Marketing is a combination of logic, emotion and creativity; it means understanding people – what they want and how you can hand it over to them (and it doesn’t matter what your product-service is). A good understanding of who is buying would help you to build the right platform to achieving your marketing objective.
I have come to realise that marketing is the point you reach when you are busy connecting with your prospective buyer (bearing in mind his or her unique needs and personalities). I have closed more deals using this method than any other method known to me. That is to say, marketing is not about understanding the market as it were; it’s about understanding people and their individual needs and styles, and meeting them using your product-service. If marketing is what you do to attract and to keep customers in your business, then knowing this person that you want to attract becomes essential to all the marketing business.
About the Author
Tony Ajah is a business growth strategist, and the Principal Strategist, TA strategic Solutions, a Lagos-based firm that is into business growth and development.Contact email: [email protected]
