Marketing a Business

Marketing is both a science and art form that requires innovative thinking, human empathy and a wealth of information. Knowing and understanding your market is as essential to marketing as the product or service you provide.

Knowing the business

Ideally, a business offers something that the competition does not. Whether it is the lowest cost, the best quality or the most innovative, a business must make the market aware of its unique position before it can sell. Yet, knowing the industry involves much more than positioning. A good marketing scheme finds multiple ways for many types of people to use a product or service. Exploiting a product's secondary-uses helps define and satisfy the market.

Knowing the market

Once a product is on the market, it has the potential to sell. But, whether or not it wins the consumer's limited dollar depends on the market itself. One must consider who makes up the market, their feelings and compulsions, their patterns and habits and everything else that factors into them making the purchasing decision (including their personal economy). Only by understanding this can a product get marketed and theoretically molded in a way that appeals to the individuals of the market. In this sense, marketing a business is more about helping someone see your product in their lives; basically, creating a need.

Empathy, or the ability to feel and understand what potential customers feel is essential to marketing, as is both secondary and primary research. Quite simply, marketing is attracting specific individuals to your business, appealing to their needs, wants and sensibilities and winning their limited funds.