Photo by Viorel Kurnosov
In marketing, you often have a unique set of issues, especially when you have limitations in your time and resources.
So you have to be both agile as well as strategic.
That means having corroboration for your core assumptions, understanding the needs of your customers, and utilizing the least-expensive productive methods.
Here’s how:
1. Corroborate your core assumptions
Determine what you need to learn. Avoid making glittering generalities from analysis paralysis. In this way, you’ll be able to stay focued on what’s most important to achieve success.
Develop a comprehensive list of pointed questions, for example:
- “How many people in my target audience could buy from us?”
- “What are their typical pain points that we can alleviate?”
- “Which of our features will be appreciated by our prospective customers?”
Determine a list of hypotheses to test, for example:
- Hypothesis: “Millennials will pay $50 a month for our service.”
- Hypothesis: “Our prospective customers waste two hours a week struggling with issues we will solve.”
2. Emphasize early confirmation for high-value insights
Directly from your prospects, obtain specific data:
- Personally interview at least a dozen prospects to learn their needs, wants and desires. To guarantee learning the most-important information, avoid getting vague yes or no answers by asking open-ended questions.
- For quantitative validation, use low-cost surveys via email, social mediums, and with free tools on your site with Google Forms. Remember to be concise and offer inexpensive incentives to generate reponses.
- Specific online communities will be helpful. Read the discussions and test assumptions by participating on subreddits or Facebook Groups.
- Test with a minimal version of your offerings via a minimum viable product or MVP with small groups. In order to justify investing further, you’ll be able to harness actual data — to either validate or invalidate your assumptions.
Marketing for Productivity, Revenue and Innovation
3. Keep testing for more market intelligence
- Analyze trends to learn whether your product category is getting stronger or declining. Study with Google Trends.
- Research industry and government data. That means checking out demographic information and trends via census data, trade associations and government databases.
- Study your competitors to learn their positioning, strengths and weaknesses. Examine their marketing strategies, websites and customer reviews. Pay close attention to their customers’ opinions.
4. Aggressively gather continuous data with a feedback loop
Never stop collecting and responding to to feedback.
- Be assertive in your feedback. Upon receiving information, catalogue and immediately act. Build brand loyalty by quickly conveying your appreciation to customers.
- Avoid the trap of confirmation bias. Entrepreneurs fail when they only look for information that confirms they’re on the right track. So, make certain to only follow accurate data, and change strategies if necessary.
Master and implement these strategies, and you’ll be on your way.
From the Coach’s Corner, here are additional marketing strategies:
Marketing Success — Stay Abreast of Continual Change — Up-to-date approaches for an interconnected marketing strategy for maximum results.
Marketing Lessons for Academic – Entrepreneur Researchers — Academic entrepreneurs are successful in developing research, but they often fall short of the goal of attaining commercial success. That’s the constructive analysis from a professor. Here’s what academics must learn.
11 Marketing Strategies that Matter — Checklist — Marketing success is possible if you’re expert in these 11 strategies.
Plan for Business Profits Using the 7 Ps of Marketing — After 250 years in the various stages of marketing, the 7 Ps of marketing are the crème de la crème in checklists to earn optimal profits.
Digital Marketing for Newbies – SEO, Content and Emails — Content marketing, emails and search engine optimization (SEO) are great marketing tools, if aligned together. Here’s a primer.
Selling has very little to do with having a golden tongue. But it has a lot to do with having a golden ear. Listen, listen, listen!
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