A few weeks ago I joined the 12 session FastTrac business development program facilitated by ITAC in downtown Manhattan. My instructor is the venerable Charlie O’Donnell. So far the program has been very informative, and I am aiming to try and cover some of the key concepts here on this blog. I’m going to start with today’s session on marketing led by Paul Kontonis of For Your Imagination Studios.

What is Marketing?

The bottom line is that marketing is about sales, period. Marketing is your company’s strategy to attract people to your product, educate them, and ultimately make a purchase. But the key is to not get lost in generalities such as “I want to run lots of ads so people are aware of my product” but rather to clearly justify why that approach will result in meeting your sales goals.

Thinking about Customers

There are two types of customers you need to consider when developing marketing approaches, first time (or trial) customers and repeat customers. The basic challenge is that the for the former, you need to figure out how to make that sale the first time, whereas the later is about making the sale again and again. Companies should develop a strategy for each and a model for what percentage of sales they are aiming to get from each category.

Most of us are familiar with the basic ways of defining a customer, such as using age ranges, income ranges, gender, location, profession, etc. Paul suggests ditching the generalities and actually picking specific targets. For example, don’t think of your target market as 18-35 year olds. Pick an age, such as 28, and plan your marketing for that. Why do this? Well, we all know that there is actually a big difference between 18-yr-olds and 35-yr-olds. If you focus very specifically on your most likely target age, 28 , you’ll get a high success rate with that age in addition to what amounts to a bell curve from around 18 to 35 all while having a much clearer picture of who you are targeting. The same can be done for most of the standard customer profile properties. For example, don’t use “urban northeast” as your geographic target, use New York City. Finally Paul recommended finding a picture to attach to this ideal customer and plastering it on your wall. This of course immediately made me think of personas, a pretty successful approach to user-centric software development.

Branding

Branding is essentially a promise of value to the customer. A successful brand will reinforce a sense of value and quality in the mind of the consumer and is particularly important for maintaining repeat customers. Brand associations revolve around tangible, subjective, verifiable or objective claims. For example, a paper towel might be marketed as the most absorbent (tangible), a microwave dinner as the most fulfilling (subjective), a burger as having the largest beef patties (verifiable), or a car with the highest 5-star crash test rating (objective).

A point was made that I think is especially important to smaller companies in the process of building their brands. Usually the founders have a vision of what their company looks like a few years out, what their offices might look like, what their customers might look like. This guides how they shape the brand. However, as the company grows these ideas influencing the brand must get out of the founder’s heads and into a form that can propagate on its own throughout the organization, so that every employee knows what the brand means and how to make decisions that accurately reflect the branding of the company.

Positioning

Positioning is how you aim to have your product perceived in the market in relation to everything else. It’s especially important for first time customers. In the market perception is truth.

Paul recommends charting a FAB analysis for your product or service. It should look something like this (notice there are two extra columns snuck in):

Features Advantages Benefits Need vs. Want Competitors?
List each “feature” of your product or service. Describe what it does. State the benefit. (there are really only three: saves time, saves money, or makes you feel better) Is this feature needed or wanted by the customer (if the product/service isn’t valuable without it, it’s a need) Do competitors have this feature? (yes / no)

Ideally, you are positioning your product/service using features that are needs and are not offered by competitors. However, good positioning is always benefit oriented.

There are 8 ways you can position your product/service:

  • product differentiation (think SUV vs minivan)
  • key attribute differentiation (the “killer feature” no one else has)
  • against a category (e.g. against “big business”, or “the old way”)
  • against a specific competitor (think Mac vs. PC ads)
  • association (with a celebrity, a location, another brand, etc. - “the Rolls Royce of easy chairs”)
  • usage (think champaign for New Years or other special events)
  • ideal user (think Marlboro or Mitchum Man)
  • problem/solution (problem: germs / solution: “antibacterial” hand soap)

Look at your chart then settle on a few approaches from the above list to best position your product/service and its most important features, and then market test them.