1.01 – Knowing Yourself, Knowing Your Customers

Marketing encompasses all the activities that build ongoing, profitable relationships with customers, ultimately driving business growth. Traditionally, the goal of marketing is to generate healthy sales through advertising, brand development, and other activities. However, a more sustainable objective is to become increasingly valuable to a growing number of customers, ensuring future success. This involves balancing short-term sales with long-term value development to make your organization a thriving success.

Your marketing program should consist of the right mix of products or services, pricing, promotions, branding, sales, and distribution. This mix should not only produce immediate sales but also support your long-term growth. When you find the right balance for your organization, it will yield profitable sales and sufficient demand, enabling comfortable growth.

This lesson serves as an introduction to marketing. By engaging with this content, you can start designing a marketing program that works for you. Subsequent lessons will help you refine this program to meet your specific needs.

Knowing Yourself, Knowing Your Customer

To make your marketing program more profitable and growth-oriented, focus on reaching and persuading the right customers. Understanding your customers’ preferences and behaviors can lead to more effective sales strategies. The following sections will help you get better acquainted with your offerings and communicate them effectively to your customers.

Asking the Right Questions

Instead of the traditional question, “What do we need to tell customers to make the sale?”, consider asking, “What do we have uniquely to offer?” This shift in perspective helps identify your genuine strengths, making your marketing message more authentic and effective. Your unique strengths form the core of your offering, and you should continue to build on these strengths in ways that are true to your identity.

Whether marketing yourself or your business, authenticity is crucial. The more true to your core the marketing message is, the more effective it becomes. If you can’t find any unique qualities to advertise, focus on self-improvement or product development before proceeding with media purchases. Ensure that your claims clearly benefit customers in a unique way, not just the typical, run-of-the-mill benefits.

When defining your market, consider your competitors and set realistic goals. Aim to be the best in a specific, manageable area before expanding. Knowing your limitations as well as your strengths is essential.

Communicating Benefits

Marketing programs communicate benefits that customers value, such as convenience, ease of use, brand appeal, design, local sourcing, healthiness, or competitive pricing. Service businesses may emphasize benefits like expertise, friendliness, and availability. Identify and list your core benefits—those you can honestly claim and that customers value.

Even if your product is superior logically, customers may still choose competitors due to emotional factors. Consider the emotional reasons people may buy from you, such as brand appeal, packaging design, professionalism, and community presence. A positive image can significantly impact customer perception and sales.

To truly know your customers, explore what they think and feel about your product. Consider both logical and emotional aspects:

What do customers think about your product? Do they understand its features and benefits? Do they perceive it as a good value? Is it easy to purchase?
How do customers feel about your product? Does it make them feel good? Do they like its personality? Do they trust you?

Create a table with two columns: “What Customers Know About” and “How Customers Feel About.” Fill in as much as you can and then validate it with feedback from customers or prospective customers.

Filling the Awareness Gap

If prospective customers are unaware of your offerings, you need to increase your marketing communications to reduce the awareness gap. Options include:

Investing more time: More sales calls can help fill this gap.
Spending more money: Increased advertising can boost awareness.
Communicating better: A strong, focused marketing program with clear, consistent, and frequent communications can fill the awareness gap effectively.
Becoming more popular: Creating buzz and encouraging word-of-mouth can also help spread awareness.

Focusing on Your Target Customer

Your target customer is the person for whom you design your product and marketing program. Create a clear profile of your target customer, including age, employer, education, income, family status, hobbies, and motivations. Use images to represent your target customer and ensure that your marketing program is focused on this audience.

Decide whether your target customer prefers a rational, information-based approach or an emotional, personality-based approach. This clarity helps ensure that your marketing program has a clear focus.

Table: Marketing to Millennials

Value	Suggested Response
Want self-expression	Involve in user-generated content
Respect is earned, not given	Use statistics, industry knowledge and experiences to position your marketing leadership and authority.
Trust equity is low because many don’t trust brands to be truthful or operate in others’ best interests	Be transparent. If you don’t have the best product, don’t say you do. If your customer service is poor, fix it before making promises. Listen and admit to wrongdoing when you’ve made mistakes.
Crave change	Keep your brand energetic and change things up to add interest and novelty.
Respond to bold colours, ideas, humour, and interaction	Use digital channels that provide interaction, such as games and bright colours that fit their energy level, and engage them in disruptive events, like guerilla marketing tactics.
Seek relevance	Your products, not just your marketing, need to fit their lifestyle and add value. Marketing should demonstrate how.
Open-minded, intelligent, responsible	Always communicate with transparency, and never talk down or misrepresent the value of an offer or product. When trust is broken, you won’t get a second chance.
Expectations for brands	Involve them in user-generated content and product design and respond to them promptly.

Table: Marketing to Generation X

Value	Suggested Response
Want to feel they are contributing to something worthwhile.	Involve in volunteerism and corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives.
Like recognition for what they do.	Send thank-you emails, invite to VIP clubs, and reward with experiences, content, discounts, or products.
Thrive on autonomy, freedom.	Give them options for pricing, packages, service agreements, and product inventory. Enable communications options as well.
Seek a balanced life.	Align your brand’s values with their values and personal life.
Accept authority but are sceptical.	Position your leadership and authority in an objective manner.
Sceptical about the economy, fearful of job loss and financial setbacks, and sceptical of big business.	Communicate the security, comfort, and peace of mind that your product and brand deliver. Be transparent about pricing and product claims. Design brand offerings around their need to feel in control and have peace of mind.
Entrepreneurial.	Appeal to their desire to initiate new programs, ideas, and movements.

Identifying and Playing Up Your Strengths

Focus on your chief strengths and build on them to add focus and momentum to your marketing program. For example, if customers are loyal because they like your product and service, build on this strength by creating a loyalty program, asking for referrals, and including testimonials in your marketing materials.

Clearly define what makes your product or service special and communicate this effectively to customers. Understanding your strengths can help overcome weaknesses in other areas.

Table: Marketing to Baby Boomers

Value	Suggested Response
Want to feel they are in control of their choices and lives.	Provide information that informs, provides guidance, and assists in decision processes.
Like recognition for what they do.	Thank them for their business, invite to VIP loyalty programs, and reward frequently.
Thrive on prosperity.	Because they have worked hard for years and want to enjoy the perks of successful careers and financial planning, promote perks, pampering, and themes around “you deserve this.”
Seek self-actualisation.	Align your messaging and experiences with what matters most, such as leaving legacies, making an impact, achieving personal goals, and recognition.
Collaborative.	Invite to your causes centred on your common goals associated with charity, environment, and so on.
Optimistic.	They see good in communities and people and like to believe people can be trusted to be who they say they are.
Goal oriented.	They like to set goals and have a plan and a purpose.

Discovering the Best Way to Find Customers

Decide whether to emphasize attracting new customers or retaining and growing existing ones. Each goal requires different marketing strategies. Common methods to attract customers include referrals, social media, trade shows, sales calls, advertising, product demonstrations, and the placement and appearance of stores.

Identify the most effective methods for your business and focus your marketing resources accordingly. Use a marketing pyramid to organize activities by impact and allocate resources to the most effective methods.

Conclusion

By understanding yourself and your customers, asking the right questions, communicating benefits effectively, filling the awareness gap, focusing on your target customer, identifying your strengths, and discovering the best ways to find customers, you can create a marketing program that supports both immediate sales and long-term growth.