Speaker 1: The biggest problem with marketing today is that it's overwhelming. So many different strategies, tactics, and tools to try, and everybody's screaming at you that their way is the best way, not the only way. That's why in this episode, I'm gonna help you cut through the clutter, and I'm gonna share with you 10 key marketing basics and fundamental principles you must know if you wanna succeed with marketing today. Let's get to it. Hey there, my name is Adam Erhart, marketing strategist, and welcome to The Marketing Show, where we help you grow your business and generate more leads, customers, and sales by making better marketing. So if you're interested in learning the latest and greatest marketing strategies, tools, tips, tricks, and tactics, well, you may wanna consider subscribing and hitting that notification bell so you never miss a future episode. Now, it's no secret that marketing can be a pretty tricky and pretty intense subject, with a lot of different tricks, and hacks, and shiny objects constantly being thrown at you, really trying to advise you to try this, and then try that, and try that, and essentially trying to sell you on whatever's current and whatever's trendy today, rather than focusing on what's really important, which are those key fundamental principles, those things that stand the test of time, because they're based on human psychology, buyer personas, and essentially all of the strategies, and all of the root core fundamental principles that really influence how people engage and interact with brands, both online and offline. Now, I'm all for tricks, and tips, and hacks, and all sort of tactical stuff that can really get you good results, but only when those are based and grounded on those proven fundamentals, those marketing basics that are just incredibly important for you to know, so that you can make sure that you're using the right strategies for whatever goal you're trying to achieve. And that's why in this episode, I'm gonna be revealing 10 marketing basics that you must know, you must learn, and you must live to love if you want to succeed with marketing today. And it all starts with number one, customer research. You see, pretty much everything involved with marketing has to do with the customer, and this is why most of the campaigns we create today are very customer-centric. They're focused around the customer, their pains, their problems, all their frustrations, and how our business or our solution is uniquely positioned to solve that for them. But to be able to do that, well, it first involves really getting to know your ideal customer avatar, that exact personification, that person that loves you, loves what you do, is happy to pay you for the value you provide, and that you enjoy working with. Now, the key here to really identifying that ideal customer and to fleshing out a persona for them is to first know, and then understand, and then to start to really deeply care for that person, so you can put yourself in their shoes, see where they're coming from, and start to create messaging that is gonna make them feel understood and appreciate the value you provide. Now, the way to do this is by first building out that ideal customer avatar based on three different principles or three different elements of your customer, including their demographic details, like age, gender, income, occupation, title, things like that, their geographic details, like what city, state, province, or country they live in, and their psychographic details, what are their attitudes, their interests, their beliefs, affiliations, organizations, basically all the head stuff that goes on upstairs. The better you're able to articulate and really build out this ideal customer avatar, well, the better and more effective all of your future marketing efforts are gonna be. All right, the next marketing basic that you need to understand is competitor research. Now, this one comes with a bit of a caveat because I don't want you to be solely focused on your competitors and what they're doing and always trying to play catch up because that's gonna leave you always a step behind. That said, it is important to know what's going on in your marketplace and in your industry so you can learn from and possibly take a different approach or at least model things that you know are working. Now, when it comes to competitor research, one of the two questions that you're gonna have to ask yourself is, do you wanna do it better or different? No approach is necessarily better than the other, though I would advocate that trying to beat someone at their own game can be a bit of a trick where if you can just find the areas that they're not focusing on and go over there by doing something a little bit different, it's gonna make the playing field a little bit easier to compete in, especially initially. Also, if you are modeling a business that's quite a few steps ahead of you, there's a few very important things to keep in mind. Number one, what they're doing now may not be what they did to get them there. Number two, what they're doing now may not be the best plan at all, could be based on some pretty bad strategy. Or number three, they could just be testing things out, which again, doesn't necessarily mean that they're working. This is why it's good to have a general idea of your competitors and what they're doing, but at the end of the day, it's important to get focused again on your customers and on your own business so you can build the best solutions for them. The next point here is specialization, which kind of plays off the point that we just talked about when we're looking at our competitors and trying to do things either better or slightly different. Well, specialization essentially says that it's better to be in a category of one. There was a great book and great strategy written on this called Blue Ocean, and basically what they're saying here is you want to compete in essentially non-competitive space by carving out your own niche, your own area, and really specializing on one key area that you can dominate in. You see, when it comes to business and when it comes to really carving out your marketing and positioning yourself in the marketplace, which we're gonna talk about in just a second, well, there's four different levels that you could attain for. On the lowest level is the generalist. This is the person that kind of does everything, is the jack of all trades, and doesn't really specialize in anything. They're gonna be the lowest paid in general. Above that is the specialist. This is someone who's taken whatever industry or whatever niche that they're focusing on and they've kind of niched down just a little bit more to focus on one key area of it. After that, you've got the extreme specialist. This is someone that's taken that specialization and taken it one step further by niching down even further to focus on an even smaller target market. And on top of all of that and the highest paid of them all is the celebrity. Now, essentially what we're doing here is we're becoming synonymous with the business that we're in, essentially becoming the big name or for lack of a better term, the guru in your space. The point here is with specialization is that in general, it's better to specialize. And the higher up the pyramid you go from generalist to specialist to extreme specialist all the way up to celebrity, well, the better the rewards and the higher the profitability in general. The next marketing basic that you really need to understand is differentiation. Now, one of my favorite quotes on this is by Sally Hogshead who says, different is better than better. And when it comes to marketing, this is pretty true. After all, we all know about businesses who offer a better product or a better service or essentially are just a better company and yet they're not the ones that win because their marketing tends to be bland or boring or vanilla or it just fades into all the noise and they don't stand out. On the other hand, controversial or polarizing brands or brands that really stand for something, well, we can remember them and whether we choose to do business with them or not, you can almost guarantee they're claiming a larger market share than they would if they just tried to fit in. One of my favorite books of all times is Purple Cow by Seth Godin which really takes the concept of being remarkable to the next level. So if you haven't read that book yet, highly recommend it. Basically, differentiation answers the question, why you? Why your business? And what makes you better or different than all of the other competitors out there? The next basic that kind of builds on all of the previous points as well is positioning. Now, positioning really just says where you stand and where your place is in the marketplace in regards to your competitors. Now, I know I said that we don't wanna focus too much on our competitors but it is important to understand where they sit so you can carve out a little space of your own in the network. Now, one of the best tools to use here in determining your business's position in the marketplace is none other than the positioning map which essentially maps out a couple different criteria in order to place your business in regards to your competitors. For example, you could have a line going down the middle that would say price and then you could have another one that would be quality. And the important thing here is to map out where your business fits on the spectrum whether you're high price, high quality or lower price, lower quality or anywhere along that line. Our next marketing basic is all about segmentation and this means really taking a good hard look at your customers and trying to identify and then segment those ideal perfect customers. The ones that really match that ideal customer avatar that you built back in step number one. These are the people that love you, love what you do, are happy to pay you for the value you provide and refer you to all their friends and family. You want more of these people. So to get them, you first need to identify them and then create that avatar around them so again, you can create marketing and messaging that's gonna resonate and gonna appeal with them. If you've been in business for any length of time then one of the easiest and most effective ways to do this is simply to take a look at your top 20% of customers and identify any traits or common attributes that they all share. Properly segmenting your customers and really identifying those ideal customers that are worth the most to your business is going to allow you to focus more on them and give them more products and more services that they really enjoy and they really value. Which moves us perfectly into our next point, concentration. Concentration is all about finding your business's most profitable and most fun and easiest to deliver service and then focusing all of your efforts there. Just like we did with segmentation to our most valuable customers, well, concentration we're gonna do with our most valuable products or services so that we can really focus on the things that actually move the needle in regards to our business's revenue and profitability. Ideally, the things that you decide to concentrate on should match the following criteria. It should be fun, it should be profitable, it should be easy to deliver, they should be relatively easy to sell and have a high demand for them, should be a sustainable business and not based on just a current trend or a fad and ideally, this product or service should have some future ability to be automated or delegated or systemized in some way so it doesn't require so much time and effort from you. You can see here that by properly segmenting your customers, it's gonna help you to decide on which areas to focus and concentrate on and when you combine these together, your business has really nowhere to go but up. The next marketing basic that you need to understand is pricing. Now, pricing psychology is an incredibly detailed and complex subject so I really just wanna cover two of the basics here so you can decide which one is gonna be best for your business and I'm gonna give you a hint which one that is. The first option is cost-based pricing which essentially, you just look at how much things cost, apply a bit of a margin and you've got your price. The other on the other hand is the significantly better choice and this is value-based pricing which is pricing based on the value that the customer is going to receive and the beauty here is that value is very subjective and it can be influenced by the marketing and by the packaging and design and service delivery of the product or service that you're selling. You see, the problem with cost-based pricing or pricing anything like it's a commodity is that it's really just a race to the bottom because you don't really have a competitive advantage other than price which means if your competitors wanna cut price, you're gonna have to cut price and then they're gonna cut it and then you're gonna cut it and everybody loses. Value-based pricing is largely subjective based on perception. For example, is a $100,000 car really 10 times more valuable than a $10,000 car? Well, it depends on your subjectivity and your perception of it. In regards to get you from point A to point B, no, they're pretty much exactly the same but if it involves things like how you're going to feel or the experience or the increased esteem or authority or whatever it is, then yes, you could see that it could be worth the price tag. This is why it's always better to focus on value-based pricing and to try to increase the value of your product or service wherever you get the chance. The next marketing basic you really need to understand especially if you wanna create effective and profitable marketing campaigns is a bit of a mouthful but it's market, message, media, match. Here's what I mean. The effectiveness of your marketing is going to largely be in part to how well you identify your ideal customer avatar, what kind of messages you put in front of them that resonate with them and that make them feel understood and then where you locate them whether online or offline so you can put your marketing in front of them. If you miss any one of these pieces of the puzzle, you misidentify your ideal target market, you don't properly isolate and identify their pains or you put your marketing in completely the wrong place, well, none of it's gonna work which is why everything has to be in alignment. This is why anytime I'm consulting with a client or we're designing a campaign through the agency, we always look at market message and media alignment match. We need to make sure that we've got the right message in the right place for the right person for everything to work. The next marketing basic you need to understand to create profitable and effective marketing campaigns is lifetime customer value. For this basic, I'm gonna link up a clip I did on another video that I think sums it up perfectly. So let's watch that now. It's the value of a customer over their lifetime to your business. Now, why is this important? Well, when you understand what the value of a customer actually is to your business, it allows you to make really strategic and really budget conscious decisions about what marketing decisions are good and which ones are bad. Take for example, you know that the average customer value of a customer to your business over their lifetime is $1,000. Well, you can then decide how much of that you want to attribute and allocate to marketing in order to acquire a new customer. For example, let's say that you can go out and buy all the customers you want for $500. Well, you may wanna do this because you're gonna get a $500 profit on each one of these decisions. Another example is let's say that you're investing in a certain marketing strategy and it's costing you $1,200 to acquire a new customer. Obviously, you're gonna wanna cut this thing off pretty short or make some modifications soon because what you're doing is you're acquiring customers at a $200 loss. Again, all sorts of different formulas and strategies and things we can look at later on this, but the key point is you really need to understand what the lifetime customer value is of a customer to your business so you can make educated and informed marketing decisions on which ones are gonna provide a return on investment and which ones are gonna lose. As you can see, by understanding the true lifetime customer value of your customers, it really opens the doors for what marketing objectives and strategies and different campaigns you're gonna run. Well, it allows you to decide which ones are gonna work and which ones are not worth your time, money, or energy. All right, the next thing you're gonna wanna do is check out the video I have linked up right here, which is an introduction to marketing. It's gonna take a lot of the principles we talked about today and add even more by giving you a better and more in-depth understanding of marketing strategy and how it all works so you can apply it to your business and your industry. So make sure to check that out now. Thanks so much for watching and I'll catch you next time on The Marketing Show.