How Do Beginners Do Marketing?

As a beginning marketer, it’s important that you choose the most convenient and low cost methods to promote your products and services.

By starting small and watching your costs carefully, this will help you learn the basics of marketing while focusing on making sales.

As you begin your marketing journey, a good rule of thumb that will always keep your marketing plan in check is:

Test small before going big.

Said another way:

Test. 

Market testing is really what “doing marketing” is all about.

As you get started building your marketing journey, here are 8 excellent tutorials that will give you a solid foundation on the basics of marketing:

1. How to Build Your Marketing Strategy
2. How does the 80/20 rule apply to marketing? (Pareto Principle)
3. I’m the Nice Customer … Who is Never Coming Back …
4. Why Customers Buy from You
5. 8 Market Research Strategies used by Marketing Professionals
6. Unique Selling Proposition vs. Value Proposition (with examples)
7. What is the marketing mix and why is it important? | The 4 P’s of marketing
8. 5 Important Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in Marketing

You’ll notice all 8 of these tutorials have at least 1 thing in common:

They all focus on the customer.

And that is the true point of beginning for your marketing.

Nothing else matters.

In fact, in marketing there are only 2 goals:

1. Gain a customer
2. Keep a customer

How Do Beginners Do Marketing?
Beginners do marketing by starting with these three activities: 

1. Conduct market research to identify an ideal target market of customers
2. Create a clear customer value proposition that your target market wants
3. Decide upon your marketing mix, also known as the 4 P’s of marketing: 1) Product, 2) Promotion, 3) Price, 4) Place.

Your website: A modern point of beginning for a new marketer

Virtually every business has a website where they provide information about the company, products offered and other vital resources. Your website is a fantastic tool for both online and offline marketing to test marketing and advertising strategies and measure how well each source of potential customer converts.

In itself, this will give you a great education on marketing.

And to say it simply, this gives you the opportunity to identify exactly how to:

Do more of what works and less of what doesn’t.

For beginners that don’t yet have tech and marketing skills, they will benefit from the free resources available at this blog. Use these resources to hone your skills and learn different strategies.

For example, place keywords strategically in your website and advertise using channels such as Google Ads and Facebook Ads.

Next, start a blog where you can share planned events, special prices and information you are an expert on. Blogging offers an excellent low cost with potentially high return way to market your business offerings using your own voice and build your credibility.

Now, kick it up a notch…

Place a Call-to-action (CTA) button on your website to tell visitors what you want them to do. This button is what converts them to move through your sales funnel and ultimately makes sales -- so you can stay in business!

Where Do I Start with Marketing?

One of the essential parts of your marketing strategy is market research—this step gives insight into your customer's thinking and tells you if there are enough customers to make your marketing worthwhile.

Marketing research reveals customer locations and buying habits, and this is what guides your efforts towards having great conversions.

The importance of starting with marketing research is that it also helps keep an eye on the competition. What are they doing right, and what’s their latest offering?

Where Do I Start with Marketing?
The first place to start with marketing is your customer. Do your research to locate concentrated segments of customers who want and can buy your product or service. Once you have your customer clearly in mind you can work on developing your marketing mix, also known as the 4 P's of marketing: 1) Product, 2) Promotion, 3) Price, 4) Place.

Trying to market to everyone is a common mistake beginning marketers often make. It is far easier and cost effective to market to someone, rather than to everyone.  Thus, segment or group your potential market based on factors such as:

• Demographics: occupation, gender, age, education level and income
• Geography: location
• Lifestyle: personality, social class, personal values

In addition, identify the unique reason consumers would buy from you instead of the competitors. This is part of the unique selling proposition that makes you stand out from the crowd.

In the majority of cases, your unique selling proposition reflects your special skills or knowledge. It can also be a unique or new offering or even an exceptional service. Determine what benefits your products have for the buyers and how you explain the business to strangers. What is it that you love most about your business?

Marketing Basics for Beginners

Again, the most important reminder for new marketers is to think like your customer.

Find out where they live, what they earn, how they buy, why they buy, who they are and what is most important to them.

This is done through market research such as surveys, customer visits, and participating in discussion forums.

Once you have some insight into the customer profile, now it's time to build the customer value proposition. The first step is to identify the basic reasons customers buy a similar product to yours. There are usually 5-7 reasons. As long as your product at least meets these reasons or has a reason for them, you can move forward. Now its time to create more value than the other options.

Find at least 1 additional BIG reason why your product is better than the others.

Now communicate this in your messaging.

With that, it’s now time to focus on your marketing mix: the 4P's: product, promotion, price, and place. A focus on these things is what moves the prospect to buy from you.

Go here for an excellent tutorial on finding your optimal price point.

Marketing Basics for Beginners
The basics of marketing starts with the customer. Once you have a clear picture of who the customer is through market research, the next step in marketing is to develop the value proposition. Finally, you can decide upon your marketing mix, also known as the 4 P's of marketing: 1) Product, 2) Promotion, 3) Price, 4) Place.

Once you start to advertise your product and services, and keep careful results, it’s time to evaluate the performance of your marketing. Generally, you will have a few Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that are most important to the company that you will use to measure the success or failure of a campaign.

Once you determine if a campaign is successful or not, you can make decisions on how to run future campaigns and measure your success against past successes.

And as always, if you need assistance along the way, we are happy to help!

About Your Strategic Marketing Partner
Sam Hirschberg, MBA, is Your Strategic Marketing Partner in Arizona. Always professional and a delight to work with, Sam is not your typical “marketing consultant”. Unlike most consultants who tell you there is a problem and say, “See you later and good luck!” Your Strategic Marketing Partner knows how to find solutions, execute programs, test and measure campaigns, and how-and-when it’s time to roll-out big! You are invited to call (602) 892-0777 to learn more about Sam’s background on his FREE 9-minute recorded message.  For more information about Sam, please visit https://strategicmarketingpartner.com.