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Start-Up Marketing Strategies
You're ready to boldly go forward into the wild world of owning your
own start-up business. Your plan is feasible, you've organized your
company into a lean, mean, profit-making machine, and you can also
taste your dreams coming true. Then you realize that before you can
turn a profit, you need to let the world know that you're open for
business.
Though the mediums of marketing have been covered elsewhere,
creating an effective marketing and/or advertising campaign requires
that you understand the factors of marketing. With those factors in
mind, creating a campaign becomes more than possible.
The first and probably most important factor is your start-up
customers. You want to know who your customers are (also known as
demographics) and what they want, in the most objective terms you
can manage. What your customers want is especially important to know
but also difficult to accurately gauge. Surveys and focus groups can
help, but even these can be uncertain. Some things to discover about
your customers include whether they're willing to pay more for
higher quality or quantity, what products they'd like to see you
carry, how much money they're willing to spend on your products, how
often they want your products or services, and what motivates them
do business with you over those of your competitors.
The second factor is your competitors. While becoming obsessed with
the slightest details of your competitors only makes you neglect
your own business, you do want to keep track of what your
competitors are trying, especially in areas where your business
overlaps with theirs. You want to focus first on your own business
and customers, checking in on your competition only occasionally.
When you do look in on competitors, you'll want to focus on what
they do in comparison to you and know what makes them both better
than your own business and what they do worse than you. Both can
provide you with a useful competitive edge.
The third factor is pricing, which is more or less how much your
products and/or services are going to cost consumers. With this
factor, you can't do enough research on what the industry standard
is. You'll want to understand pricing so you'll know what you should
charge for your business. However, pricing isn't the most important
factor in your products. The range of your product line and the
value of your products (ie; what your customers get for the money
they spend) are crucial. Playing the game of lowering your prices
below your competitors will only lead to disaster, especially if you
try to lower your prices through coupons and discounts. If you
discount too much, eventually you'll make your customers adverse to
paying full price.
Publicity is the fourth factor, and this refers to advertising.
Whatever advertising you do pay for, try to make sure there's a way
to track the number of people who see your promotions. Similarly,
the fifth factor of place is where and how you sell your product.
Here, research will also be important. Knowing where and how to sell
you products effectively will require some trial-and-error style
research, as well as gathering ordinary studying and background
information.
Marketing campaigns, elaborate or otherwise, can help any business.
But knowing how to market your start up will make any marketing
campaigns, whatever they are, worth the time and money you put into
them.
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