What is Marketing?
The activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large is termed Marketing.
The “Secret” to Successful Marketing is:
- To understand what your target customers’ needs, demands, and wants are before your competitors can.
- Offer them the products and services that will satisfy those needs, demands, and wants.
- Provide customer service, convenience, and value.
Marketing Plan
- To be effective, a solid business plan must contain both a financial plan and a marketing plan.
- Before producing financial projects, an entrepreneur must determine what to sell, whom and how, on what terms and at what price, and how to get the product or service to the customer
- The primary focus of the Marketing Plan is Capturing and Maintaining a Competitive edge for a small business.
Building a Bootstrap Marketing Plan
Bootstrap Marketing Plans are unconventional, low-cost, creative techniques that allow (usually) small companies to get more “bang” / “reach” from their marketing budget (money) than do large rivals.
Unconventional, low-cost, creative marketing strategies are designed to give small companies an edge over their larger, richer, more powerful rivals.
Building a Bootstrap Marketing Plan
A bootstrap marketing plan should accomplish three objectives:
- It should pinpoint the specific target markets the company will serve
- It should determine customer needs and wants through market research
- It should analyze the firm’s competitive advantages and build a marketing strategy around them.
Determine Customer Needs & Wants Through Market Research
Conducting market research involves four steps: