Your Helping Business

WHAT IS MARKETING?

Marketing is the process you use to tell the world about your service.

It’s both an art and a science and there are as many definitions of marketing as there are academics who teach it and marketing managers who do it!

Marketing includes defining the ‘market’ you want to engage with, analysing the ‘marketing environment’ in which you operate, and creating a strategy for your marketing process.

There is a lot to it. I have several marketing textbooks, all between 800 and 1200 pages! But most of this material is describing how different organisations have gone about the process.

There is a very simple and comprehensive set of ‘tools’ that anyone can use to understand their market and create a marketing strategy.

Don’t think though that marketing is just about ‘advertising’, it’s a serious mistake that many businesses make.
What about selling?

People often decide that they don’t want to set up any kind of business because they ‘can’t sell’ or ‘don’t want to sell’.

This is outdated thinking. The world has moved on. Back in the last century, the only way people could find out about anything they wanted or even discover that they did want something was to go into a store and ask a ‘salesperson’.

There was no internet, no search engines, no advertising on TV or even on the radio. There were only newspapers, magazines and billboards, and in the stores, all the goods were behind the counter – so you had to ask!

Selling is the end result of Marketing

The purpose of your marketing effort is to engage with potential clients and facilitate their buying decision.
‘Selling’ is a 5-step process that matches the buying process described next.

Unfortunately, the ‘traditional’ 20th century sales process is much disliked by anyone who isn’t a ‘dyed in the wool’ salesperson.

Most people don’t like being referred to or even thought of as a ‘prospect’, and they certainly don’t like being ‘closed’, or the ‘hard’ or ‘soft’ ‘sell’ that goes on in between.

People now have the resources to research their own information and make their own decisions that didn’t exist in the last century, but unfortunately many businesses haven’t yet got that message and still try to ‘sell’ people.

Marketing Basics

If you do the marketing well, then ‘sales’ becomes irrelevant because people will simply ‘buy’ from you without having to be ‘convinced’ further.

It would be impossible to cover the whole of this topic here. But from the point of view of getting your business started you need to do two things. The first is to set up your marketing system and the second is to set it in motion to promote the launch of your business.

The first thing you have to decide is the outcome of your marketing effort – what you want to achieve. This will be on a scale from ‘awareness’ through ‘engagement and then to ‘purchase’.

These can mean many things but whatever any specific marketing exercise is about the end result you are looking for in the long or short term is a purchase – or as the ‘sales’ fraternity would have it, to ‘close the sale’.
I don’t subscribe to the sales jargon of prospecting and closing and so on as it implies that the decision to purchase is a result of some sort of ‘sales effort’. It isn’t, it might have been in the past but in the information age, in the 21st Century, the decision to buy is entirely down to the potential client.

The purpose of marketing in your business is to make potential clients aware of you, and to influence then to make the decision to engage with and purchase what they want from you.

Keep that in mind – focus on the marketing and forget about ‘selling’. Engage properly with the clients and they will engage with you, especially when they don’t feel they are being ‘sold’ to.

To be successful in marketing you need to deploy a means of ‘inbound’ marketing also known as Attraction Marketing. This does what it says on the tin – attracts people to you and attracts them to engage with you.

The ‘old school’ way is ‘outbound’ or Persuasion Marketing often involving cold calling and ‘hard’ selling. It used to work, back in the day, but now people know when they are being ‘sold to’ and they don’t like it.

Your Market?

Now you’re clear about what your business is all about and what services, and benefits it provides, the next thing to consider is ‘the market’.

Although, in truth, you should have been considering this already – we know there are real people out there who need what we provide but do they want those benefits?

People only ever buy stuff they only ‘need’ when the benefits far outweigh the ‘pain of purchase’.

No-one wants to buy petrol or diesel – what they want is their vehicle to be able to move!

We know there are thousands of potential clients ‘out there’ but:

• Who are they?
• Who are you to them?
• What is your service, to them?

If you provide something already being purchased by people, then you know there is a market for what you provide and its then a question of giving them a reason to buy from you.

But if your service is innovative or completely new and unknown then it’s a different matter.

Unless you can convince people, you can provide a benefit better than they are getting elsewhere – or an ‘alternative’ benefit, then you not only have to identify who you think might want, and buy, it, but you have to create ‘demand’.

This can be done of course. No-one wanted a car or a smartphone when they were first introduced but now most households have more than one of each.

Very few people think they need a coach, and most people won’t admit, even to themselves, they might need a therapist.

Creating demand can be expensive, especially if you are wanting to sell to the ‘mass market’, but if you plan to serve a ‘niche’ market it will take less effort and resource.

In our case, the ‘mass’ market begins with the term ‘anyone who . . . A niche market is a specific group, something like ‘55-60 year olds approaching retirement’ or ‘young single mothers struggling to cope’. And then you can shrink your niche geographically.

Purchase Engagements

In defining your market this is the crux of the matter – you see, there are two types of purchase that people make:

Transactional Purchases are usually made based on price for a non-differentiated product or service – like a can of beans or domestic energy supply. The buyer in these instances has no relationship with the provider – especially when the transaction is done on line.

Relational Purchases on the other hand tend not to be price sensitive. The main factor buyers are looking for is continuity or involvement. Continuity of service and of the relationship, the personal relationship, that you as the provider create with them.

This situation arises when you are providing what I would describe as time-based offerings – where it is important that the provider and user (not the ‘consumer’) need to maintain an ongoing relationship for the product or service to be delivered effectively.

Why Would They Buy?

Having dealt with the ‘who’ question now let’s have a look at the ‘why’ – from the buyer’s point of view – and the questions to be asked are:

Why Me? Why would they buy from you in particular? What’s special about you that would cause them to purchase what they want from you, and not from someone else?

Why This? Why would they buy this particular offering instead of something else? Remember that it’s not the actual service they want but the benefits it provides to them, and at the same time you should consider what else they might buy (and from whom) to provide that benefit.

Why Them? This is a question about your potential clients – why are you expecting that they might buy from you? What’s special about them that creates a match between what you offer and the benefit they want? And what, by the way, do you think they want?

Why Now? Why is it that they are looking to engage now? Is there some sort of time sensitivity, and if so what is it? Is this a one-off occasion when the purchase can be made or is it something that could be purchased at any time? And if so, why might they want to ‘Buy Now’?

Niche Markets

What is a niche market?
A niche market is a small section of the population who have a great interest in a particular benefit and they can be classified in several ways.

The questions you have to ask yourself are who is going to want (and buy) this? Why would they, and why would they buy it from me? What age group (or ‘generation’) are they in? Where are they – city or country? And so on.

As you do this you create an ‘avatar’ of your typical or ideal customer which will then help you to work out how you are going first to ‘reach’ them and then to get them to want to purchase from you.

Target Market

These people are termed your ‘target market’.

You may find there is more than one specific group who are likely to purchase from you and that’s OK, but any more than three target markets is impractical at this stage of your business as you’ll use different methods of marketing for each group.

You can use this ‘mind map’ (from Peter Thomson) to help you with this. A video explanation of how to use it can be downloaded here.

Once you have identified your avatar, or while you are doing that, you also need to consider your competitors.

I’ve encountered a lot of new businesses that set up in the belief that they have ‘no competition’ – usually because they think what they provide is ‘unique’ or considerably better/cheaper than similar offerings.

In our sector however, I can confidently say there is no competition. Why? Because we are working n a personal basis with our clients. There are thousands of RTT providers, thousands of Dreambuilder coaches, thousands of Proctor Gallagher Consultants, but we are all different. Once a potential client knows, likes and trusts you or me, then there is no competition.

The only thing is, once you’ve established that relationship with your client you must make sure they know all about all the services you offer. If you are a coach and a therapist, you don’t want them going somewhere else because they “didn’t know you did therapy”!

You have to establish the relationship first, don’t bombard them with everything you do up front.
Don’t forget people buy benefits, not specific services, and if they can get the same benefit out of some completely different offering then that is where the competition is.

It also depends on what type of benefit they are seeking, as different generations look for different classes of benefit.

Once you have decided on your target market, and know who they are, the next question to ask yourself is “Well, who am I to them?” and “why would they purchase from me (or my business)?”

MARKETING MIX

The ‘Marketing Mix’ consist of four elements the balance between which defines your likelihood of marketing success. They are: Product, Place, Price and Promotion.

Product
In our case this will more usually mean ‘Service’ – the services you and I provide. We need to think carefully about this. What does our service ‘look like’ to potential clients? How do they perceive it? What does what we have to offer ‘mean’ to them?

We mustn’t make it too ‘bland’. Remember people have this obsession with ‘labelling’ everything. They think they ‘know’ what a ‘Life Coach’ is and what a ‘life coach’ does. The same with ‘therapist’ or ‘healer’. They think they know, and they think they don’t need or want that, but they have no idea. We need to give more information.

Not about what you or I ‘do’ but about ‘what’s in it for them’ and we have to make it easy to understand. Remember, we know what we do and all about it, but they have no odea what we’re talking about (at first) much of the time. More about this when we come to ‘Promotion’ but here’s an idea.

Put what you do in a ‘box’ and ‘sell the box’.

I’m not going to go into this in detail here because every one of us will have a different box (or boxes) so to explore this please book a coaching call and we’ll look specifically at what you do, what you have to offer, and help you design your ‘box’.

Place
This is about how and where your service is delivered. First of all, does the client come to you or do you go to them, or both? Can you deliver online (via Zoom etc.) or does it need to be face-to-face or hands-on?

Is your service local, as it usually is in the case of hands-on services, or can you service clients anywhere in the World? If you visit clients, how far are you prepared to go to do that and are travel expenses part of your package?

If you’re delivering your service online what are the arrangements for the client to connect?

Are there any other aspects of your service, such as follow up materials which need to be delivered to the client and how will this be done?

Price
There is a delicate balance in your market between your ideal client and the price they are prepared to pay.

You want to charge, not the highest or lowest price you can for your offering, but the optimal price. That’s the price that will bring in the right number of clients in relation to the costs you need to cover and your capacity to deliver.

If the price is too high you may not get enough clients to cover your costs and make a profit and you may find yourself with spare capacity.

If the price is too low, there may be an excessive demand that you are unable to meet whilst still perhaps making the same profit as you would have if the price were higher.

It’s a delicate balance and the ‘right’ price for your target market will evolve through testing but there are some ground rules you can apply to your marketing.

First, without contrast anything will appear to be expensive or cheap. You must compare the price of the benefit you provide with that of another, maybe unrelated, benefit to provide your buyer with perspective.

Second, you have to make a decision about the value of your personal time, especially if your business involves you personally delivering the offering. As a rule of thumb for a coach or therapist this should be in the region of at least £1 per minute as a standard and much more if you have a skill or expert knowledge that is in short supply.

Third – Pay Yourself First. This is a key business mindset that many people forget especially at the beginning. I remember in my first business that I was the last person that I would pay, only taking money out for myself when and if it was available.

You must pay yourself first, even if that is only a paper exercise and you reinvest the money.

This is especially important even when you are not personally delivering the service – what is your time input to operate the business? How much time are you focused on the business – and what is that time worth?

How you work out your pricing and how you implement the contract principle, and how much you pay yourself are covered in detail in the Personal Business Creation System.

Promotion
I’m always surprised at how many businesses think that marketing is just about advertising, continually placing ‘ads’ seemingly at random.

Marketing is not advertising, but advertising is part of marketing, where appropriate. In fact, advertising is only a subset of the larger area of ‘promotion’.

As a business you want to ‘promote’ the benefit you offer to clients or other businesses so they become aware of it and really this is what we are concerned with here – promotion of what you offer.

‘Marketing’ of course is much more than that, including market analysis, strategy, research and so on. All this is covered elsewhere. This is about promotion and how and where you do it.

There are three elements to promotion: informing, advertising and promotion itself. There are clear but perhaps subtle differences between the three.

Informing is primarily about giving out information without charge, maybe in return for contact details, maybe not. This can be done by using ‘free reports’, tips booklets, videos, webinars, books and live presentations. It’s all about telling people who you are, what you do, and what benefits you offer.

Promotion moves it up a level and can be done in several ways, but usually by other people talking about you or getting you into a position where you can engage with their network or sphere of influence. Recommendations, referrals and testimonials come into this category as do things like press releases, interviews and ‘guest speaker’ opportunities. The key to promotion is that it is initiated (albeit at your request) by someone else.

If you initiate it for example by organizing your own event or taking a stand at a trade show then unless it’s purely about giving free information with no ‘pitch’ at the end, it’s advertising.

As soon as you place the benefits you offer in a context where you are offering something in exchange for money it becomes advertising. Once that element of persuasion is added, however subtle you think it might be, it becomes an ‘advert’ and people see it as such.

Don’t think that people can’t see the subtleties of persuasion, they do, after all its going on around everyone all day and every day. It’s a complex subject, too detailed to be dealt with in full here but be careful what you say and what you write. And importantly, avoid letting your informational or promotional activity turn too obviously into advertising.

People like to be given information by you and by third parties on your behalf, but they don’t like being told what to do or what to think. They don’t like to be told that they need something they know they don’t. They don’t like to be told they are ‘missing out’ on something they don’t want. And they really don’t like to be told they are in some way inadequate because they don’t have something that other people have.

Now we’ll move on to some other aspects of marketing.