Marketing Tips, Tricks and Traps

1. Marketing Steps

• Classifying your customers' needs.
• Targeting your customer(s).
• Examining your "niche".
• Identifying your competitors.
• Assessing and managing your available resources.
• Financial.
• Human.
• Availability.

2. Marketing Positioning

• Follower versus leader.
• Quality versus price.
• Innovator versus adaptor.
• Customer versus product.
• International versus domestic.
• Private sector versus government.

3. Sales Strategy

• Use customer-oriented selling approach - by constructing agreement.
• Phase one: establish rapport with customer - by agreeing to discuss what the customer wants to achieve.
• Phase two: determine customer objective and situational factors - by agreeing on what the customer wants to achieve and those factors in the environment that will influence these results.
• Phase three: recommend a customer action plan - by agreeing that using your service will indeed achieve what customer wants.
• Phase four: obtaining customer commitment - by agreeing that the customer will acquire your service.
• Emphasise customer advantage.

4. Benefits vs. Features

The six "O's" of organising customer buying behaviour:

• Origins of purchase: who buys it?
• Objectives of purchase: what do they need/buy?
• Occasions of purchase: when do they buy it?
• Outlets of purchase: where do they buy it?
• Objectives of purchase: why do they buy it?
• Operations of purchase: how do they buy it?