Marketing, Strategy and Management: My Observations.

Who wants your product, who needs your product and who ought to need your product. These are all market segments. Other than these, they are all noise and not worth pursuing so much. How many market segments do you need? As much as possible and as much as you can. That means, based on current business environment, your product should appeal to few small markets rather than just one big market. Because, nowadays a single big market is almost non-existence.

Why market segmentation is important? I have only one answer for this. Market segmentation is important because it helps you with the rest of the things you need to do for your business. So it is damn and extremely important.

I remember attended a fourth progress meeting (Work In Progress meeting) whereby the whole project members including the project manager have not thought about “who is this product for?” and “for what purpose?”. And yet they are busy operationalizing the ideas and that gave them an answer why they cannot operationalize it.

Did someone asks “how to do market segmentation?”. To do it you need to do research. You only need THREE main things for research. Firstly you need a pen and paper, secondly you need questions and thirdly you need to find the answers. That’s all. Serious and no joke. You can refer to my Marketing Plan e-Book; when it’s ready. I promise it’s going to be really “dirt cheap!”. I am trying hard to balance the visual and words to fit into majority of our learning preferences.

Let me repeat, how to do market segmentation: RESEARCH. And to RESEARCH you need:

1.Pen and Paper
2.Lots of Questions
3.Find the Answers

I don’t pretend to be over simplistic. But why can’t simplify the process and works towards perfection? Instead of waiting to make things perfect and end up not going anywhere, why wait too long?? You bet, in my Marketing Plan e-Book, I guarantee you that I hold this principle so well that I am going to constantly update the version until you and I happy about it.

Ponder this, a paragraph that’s in my soon-to-launch Marketing Plan e-Book:

“I once thought the same and I quit my job because I think I want to give 110% for that business idea. What was my business idea? A healthy restaurant, the tagline shouts “tastier, healthier!”. Sounds good? Wrong. Tagline doesn’t make any sales.”

Sometimes as small business owner we make simple mistake like this. As human being we love taglines. Why? Simply because majority of the taglines sound really good. It is like Horatio of CSI one-liner. But CSI is a movie and they have scriptwriter. And we are not in script writing business, unfortunately.

What we need to do as small business owner is to do away tagline first. Because I bet after you launch your business, see your products in action, talk to your customers and get their feedbacks, you will find your tagline is not that relevant. In some companies, tagline becomes the butt of jokes! I am not saying tagline is not important, but you have a few steps away before you reach that. In fact, a memorable tagline can help your business but it is not your core business.

Market segmentation is about the customer. So when you design question to do that research, you should design in such a way as if you are the customer. If you can’t picture that, get a friend outside your organization and ask them about your product or organization. If they don’t know, perhaps you want to ask your colleagues, maybe they have some clients issues that might be useful in your research.

You can also use social media to ask such questions. Many product developers these days use blogs, social media like Facebook and Twitter and online survey to gather first hand information without having to do sweat. The data you get might not be highly accurate, but it will help you a lot in developing some hypotheses or assumptions.

Check out my preview Marketing Plan e-Book at www.slideshare.com/bitesconsulting

In essence, the emerging marketing tool. Period.

I am personally involve in Online Marketing for the last 2 years, fairly new but when someone asked me about it, I said “the most powerful marketing tool and its going to be big; businesses should leverage on it.” I don’t say this because I am in the industry (because I am more competent in the strategy and process parts), but because from my resources, a lot of data suggests that “online marketing is going to make your business global by staying local.”

The business of online marketing is around few billions $$$. Now, it is not enough to just have a website or blog. Someone has to come and consume the content and pass it around. Alternatively you need to actively participate in other people’s website or blog through online banners and search marketing. A new business people especially entrepreneur need to know how to make their own website, online banners, design and shoot videos and make it into a nice short movie. Because if you don’t, it is going to cost you a bomb again to run your own online marketing campaigns. Internet has democratize the marketing tools and reaching the target consumers by the millions people.

Normally for you to reach a 100, 000 targeted consumers you need to spend around $ 250, 000 – $ 500, 000 and most of the time you need more time to slowly phased the campaigns. With online? You probably spend 10% of that and reach in less than 1 week. That what online marketing can do. And from online marketing you can change your campaigns and try run for a few times. Suit yourself, and this is where you know-how to develop your own website, design and cut your own movie. However, one thing for sure where traditional marketing still relevant with online marketing is the marketing plan. You still need marketing plan, strategy and process plan so you don’t get off track.

Don’t think when you build it, people will come! Wrong mindset dude!! This is where traditional marketing get it wrong. And some online marketers too get this wrong. They think just building website or blog, the customer will rush into them. They think by simply advertised in newsprint, billboards and brochures; the customer will buy and come. Ads in the market are cluttered and to break the clutter, hell man it is damn difficult!

So how to do and have a succint online marketing plan? Will tell you more on online marketing soon! Cheers!