Marketing Commandments 101

Research is one of the most important aspects of development that's why it always comes before it. Research in our context is understanding and exploring all the different elements and factors that are and can influence the business.

Have a clear understanding of the purpose of your marketing adventures. There isn't an automatic, universal reason to market.

When you are competing with other businesses and reaching out to customers, you better understand what is unique about your offering so you can emphasize that and make it easy for the customers to choose you over others.

No business caters universally and hence there's no point aspiring to do so. To run effective marketing programs and campaigns you must have a clear understanding of your target market segment.

It is very important to have clear concepts. Marketing can be a very expensive and in many cases wasteful process especially if you dont clearly understand the concepts in relation to your business. The conceptualizing section should help you understand and go through the relevant concepts. Make sure to write down your responses as per the accompanying sheet in the introduction section.

Identify your competing entities and equally important is to identify not competing entities as well. While competition is healthy and helps businesses and consumers in many ways, unnecessary competition or an illusion of that may water down the resources and create huge distractions.

Optimally pricing products and services according to the business model, market segmentation and trends and based on the customer base and psyche can greatly help a business. On the other hand, not doing so can greatly hurt it and might keep it struggling for a long time.

Clear understanding of goals and targets and identifying and allocating resources is a key to successful marketing.

After conceptualization, planning section encompasses formulation of an effective marketing plan or campaign as the case might be. Effective planning leads to successful execution and takes care of many problems which might occur during execution phase. Please make sure you complete the writing exercises following each lecture.

I have seen so many businesses ignoring the power of teaming up and working jointly with other businesses. Many of these businesses mistakingly consider these potential benefactors as competitors and waste resources on the wrong side of the equation. Successful strategic or tactical partnership and collaboration can give a serious boost to a business through resources and knowledge sharing.

Marketing tools market place is rapidly changing. With a vast variety of conventional and unconventional tools, it takes a significant amount of research and deliberation to choose the suitable tools to avoid wastage of time and money and deploy an effective campaign. 

It is important to know and keep track of the money spent and the benefit received in Return on Investment form. Analytics help us in tracking and figuring out the value for our money and efforts and also effectiveness of each of the tools and techniques used.

Execution is where most business owners emphasize, however, without understanding the concepts and due planning, execution can never be effective and rarely produces desired results. In this section we discuss important aspects and factors affecting execution of a marketing plan or a campaign.

Marketing is an art and a science of its own accord. All of the three sections; conceptualizing, planning and executing play important role in success of any program, project or activity including marketing. It is important to understand all the aspects explained here and utilize them as and when necessary. We will be going into more depth of these concepts in our upcoming courses.