Marketing Your Business Part 1 of 3

English vocabulary and phrases, Business English: marketing, marketing strategy, competition, customer, market.

You’ve decided to start a business or you have an existing business. Have you thought about how you are going to market your business, products, or services? Just what is marketing? Marketing is simply communicating to the market, your customers and your competitors too, what your business is, what products or services you sell, and what benefits and values customers will receive.

The basics of marketing are easy to understand. Implementing marketing strategies that work for your unique business, products, or services is the difficult part.
Some things to remember when you are beginning to think about marketing whatever you want to sell or deliver in services is who are your customers? Who are you competitors? These two essential elements need to be addressed, studied, and researched before you begin to start marketing your business. Many large and small companies have failed at attempting to market a new product or service because they didn’t understand the market they were attempting to enter. They didn’t understand the customers they wanted to market to and they certainly didn’t understand the competitors in the new market. It is vitally essential that any business; new and existing, large or small, understand the target customers and understand who the competitors are. You can be assured your competitors will know whom the target customers are and you can be assured they will know who you are.

Why do you need to understand your competitors? Because, for the simple reason, they are taking sales and revenue away from you by providing products and services that may or may not be better or worse than what you have. What they have done is researched, studied, and understood your products and services and come up with strategies to position their products and services in a way that the customer perceives theirs to be the product with the better value.

That’s right, positioning their products in way that a customer perceives your competitors products provide a better value. What you are selling is not just a physical product or an intangible service but a value or a benefit to the customer. Customer perception is about finding the best value for the dollar, whether it be at the low-end of the market or at the high-end of the market, it doesn’t matter, its still about value and benefits. Some customers want a price that is low but still good quality, some want excellent quality and are willing to pay a higher price for the product. Whatever the behavior of the customer, finding the low price and good quality or finding the excellent quality with a higher price is still perception of benefits and value. What the marketer, the business, has to do is decide who are the target customers and market to that target group effectively.

Not to be forgotten again are your competitors. Yes that’s right plural, competitors, because more than likely there will be many competitors out there trying to do just what you are doing, attempting to find the target customers and market to them successfully.

This is a part one of a three part series on marketing and your business. Part two will focus on finding and marketing to the correct target market, your customers. Part three will focus on understanding your competitors so you will be able to better position your products and services in a way that the customer perceives your products to be the better value and benefit.

By: Thomas Metts
Contributor/Consultant