SMARKETING! A MARKETING PERSPECTIVE How to make “YOUR MARKETING” work for you…

Avuyile Matiso
Aug 2, 2015
3 min read

Marketing is about communicating the value of a product, service or brand to customers or consumers for the purpose of promoting or selling that particular product, service, or brand. It aims to create a need or the awareness of a need. For businesses the main purpose of marketing is to increase product sales and therefore the profits of the company.

Which one is important between marketing and sales is a fairly debatable topic, and the decider will be based on the type of business. If you’re a sales-driven company, you may tend to view sales as the moneymaker and marketing as the money spender. There’s some truth to that, but to be fair, the real role of marketing is to get the most appropriate customers and prospects to decide that your business is the best place to buy the products and services you provide. Even though they play separate and distinct functions, they are equally important and their main common goal is to increase revenue.

But that is a topic for another day. Main focus here is to look at how important marketing is and how to make it beneficial. Marketers have long known the commercial value of influence. According to Azeem Azhar a CEO of a startup called PeerIndex “Influence marketing has become huge – and has become an essential part of the marketing mix over the past years. There are different types of marketing and each company should look at the relevant ways that will work for them.

Marketing is there to make people know about you and what you do so that a sale can be made. But then again there are certain common marketing pitfalls businesses find themselves in, below is the different ways this can be avoided to make your marketing efficient:

Don’t tell customers how great you are- always under promise & over deliver.
Avoid the marketing-speak trap- Don’t fall for the temptation to make big claims, empty promises, and mind-boggling jargon. Learn to speak a new customer-specific dialect based on current research and homework. Go directly to the source – your real live customers, and get their priorities, issues, pressures, and challenges.
Don’t waste your time networking with strangers -Start networking smarter and smaller. Invite key people for coffee or lunch one-on-one, and get to know them and their business. Aim first and foremost to make them a friend, and the connections to others will come naturally. Working the circuit of big groups of strangers is minimally productive.
Don’t waste your time following up-If you are focused exclusively on prospects who are actively seeking to solve the problem you are positioned to solve, you won’t need five or seven attempts to get their attention. They will call you back.
Never dumb it down for social media!!- Many entrepreneurs fear giving away their very best insights, strategies, or tools via social media – it might diminish the demand and the profit. But also be careful of the many critics you will find on social media and always be prepared.
Check the grammar and spelling of your advertisements, use appropriate ad placements- a lot of companies have fallen into the trap of making these silly mistakes. This gets you thinking if the “any publicity is really good publicity” phrase is really true.
But overall be creative and don't be afraid to take risks. :-)