Seven Fundamental Marketing Principles
Marketing is defined as a suite of principles and strategies you use in your business to persuade your target market to contact your business. Marketing is beneficial to your business because it:
- Establishes awareness that your business exists
- Promotes branding and name recognition
- Provides general information about your business or your products / services
- When done well, it creates trust and credibility
- Distinguishes your business from the competition
- Communicates new products and services
The key to effective marketing is to send a message that resonates with your target market, attracts them to your business, and compels them to contact you.
To support and inspire your marketing strategy, here are 7 fundamental marketing principles. The absence of any of these principles can undermine the effectiveness of your marketing:
- Identify what your target wants and needs: The wants and needs of your target market influence the products and services you offer, and how you go about marketing to them.
- Provide relevant products and services: Position and promote your products and services so that they are attractive to the target market.
- Emphasize solutions and benefits, more than features: Solutions and benefits are the true value of your offering and will more likely ignite emotion and ultimately move your target to buy.
- Build a relationship with your target market: Demonstrate, through marketing, that they need you and that they will be better off because of what you can offer them.
- Be consistent in how you brand your business: The key here is to demonstrate your uniqueness, deliver of your promise, and to maintain a consistent branding message.
- Start simple and build your strategy over time: Take a phased approach when rolling out your marketing efforts. Don’t do it all at once. You will feel overwhelmed, and it will be too much to manage.
- Marketing is an ongoing process; it never stops: A business that wants to be sustainable and profitable should continually invest time and energy in marketing.
