Marketing - more than commonsense?

Marketing - more than commonsense?

Everyone is talking about integrated marketing. But what does it really mean in the context of your business and the day-to-day 9 to 5 shuffle?

It goes without saying that every part of your business should be connected to marketing in some way, and taking an integrated approach is the back-bone of success. But what does that mean?

If you’re a small business you wear many hats or if you are a larger company you have several departmentalised functions. Let’s start with marketing. Marketing is there to find new customers and ways of providing those customers with the satisfaction and value they derive from your product or service. The role of sales is hopefully made easier by the marketing activities. Operations or your production team are there to deliver what is promised by marketing and do so efficiently and profitably. The finance department has to support marketing and operations in the fulfillment of their accountabilities and maintain the company’s profits.

This is obviously painting a very basic picture but what I’m getting at is that every part of your business touches marketing and if everything is integrated, the power of innovation is in your hands.

Doing new things

Innovation allows us to do new things. The process by which your business does business is a marketing tool in itself. It is the mechanism by which you can find and keep customers. It’s what I would call “differentiation”.

If your business process and every department of your business is really in tune with marketing, you’ll find powerful ways to be innovative. It doesn’t have to be earth shattering; it could be in changing a few words or a small gesture. Every department of your business must always ask, “what is the best way to do this?” and always take the customer’s point of view. Which brings me nicely onto my next point.

Customer is king

Heard that one before haven’t we? What it means for business owners and marketers is that any marketing strategy starts, ends, lives, breaths and dies with your customer. Everything else is a moot point, nothing but the customer and what the customer wants matters. These customers have a sea of expectations, their attitudes, beliefs, opinions and everything else that makes up the subconscious mind is where the buying decision is made. We’re starting to dive into the psychology of sales and that’s not what this is about, let’s talk about marketing again.

There are two pillars to any successful marketing strategy — the demographics and psychographics. So what I’m saying is that if you understand who your customer is, you can determine why they buy.

Taking it seriously

OK, forgive me for being a little over dramatic, Marketing isn’t really as complicated as I’ve described and nor does it need a degree in psychology. The point is that most small and medium-sized businesses regard the function of marketing as mere “common sense”.

What is common sense? All common sense amounts to is your opinion. We see businesses all too often deciding what they want to do without any information and without any interest in what is true. This could be as simple as throwing together a clip art logo and choosing colours because that’s the colour your dog likes, but in reality it will completely and utterly turn off your target customer right away.

These may be strong words but I am trying to prove a point. There is a science to marketing. You need to be interested in it and you need to give it the investment in time and resources that it deserves. There’s a reason that companies like Disney, Fedex and McDonald’s spend what they do to get their brands right and get their marketing message out to their customers.

Small businesses obviously don’t have the money to throw at marketing like these brands do but you can afford to make sure that there isn’t one part of your business within your company that isn’t asking questions around marketing.

And if you are going to do something, isn’t it worth doing it properly? You know what they say — if you invest in peanuts you will get monkeys. Find a credible expert who can quickly show an understanding of your business and your customer to help you market effectively. It’s an investment.

Sian Lenegan is account director at Sixth Story.

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