Winning the Marketing Game Requires Mastering the Fundamentals

Every game has fundamentals that must be mastered to achieve a championship level. In baseball, it’s hit, throw, run, and catch. Basketball requires you to dribble, pass, shoot and rebound. The game of football demands you to run, throw, catch, block, tackle, and kick. Each game has its unique rules and playing philosophies.

Marketing your business is no different.

When you play without knowing the fundamentals you will quickly fumble away your chances of winning. Many small business owners fly by the seat of their pants when it comes to the marketing fundamentals. What they usually do is copy what their competition is doing!

This is the probably the worst idea they could possibly have. What if their competition is doing it wrong and getting terrible results? What if the competition is going after a totally different target market? What if the competition is pricing their product or service to cheaply to make money? Does soundly like a good approach, does it?

That’s where the fundamentals come in. You must focus your efforts on four different areas of marketing to win the game:

1. Market: Know your target market and what they want, need or desire

2. Message: Create a clear, consistent and compelling message

3. Media: Deliver the message through the media your target market prefers most

4. Relationships: Create, nurture and leverage relationships with your customer or clients

Each of these areas are totally dependent on the other and must be addressed to work. Typically, only one or two are addressed by the small business owner. They create a message and give little thought to what the market wants. Or, they discover a media method to deliver but fail to develop a compelling message that works (think internet websites).

Just like if you were playing for the Super Bowl title in football and didn’t know how to tackle, you wouldn’t have a chance of winning. No matter how well you ran or caught the ball you would lose the game because you lack this one key fundamental.

So as you play the marketing game remember these four fundamentals – market, message, media and relationships.

It’s because business owners and entrepreneurs are struggling to find qualified prospects and communicate a clear, simple offer to them…that leads to steady and repetitive sales. The owner is usually great at doing whatever it is he or she does but has absolutely no “marketing” skills. But…if they only knew how to market clearly, consistently, and relentlessly they would dominate their competition and not worry about how they are going to pay the bills!

What Would Your Business Look Like If You Had More Marketing Wins and Fewer Losses?

How many marketing wins did you record in the last 12 months? How many losses?

Are you even keeping score? Most businesses owners don’t. They only find out the score when it’s too late – when sales bottom out and profits dive into the red and they’re left scrambling.

Marketing is the ultimate game in business. Either you are playing the game and giving it maximum effort or you’re sitting on the sidelines watching your competitors score. Every competitive game has a scoring system to determine the winners from the losers. In the business world its how much profit your marketing generates!

The scoring system of the marketing game is simple: if your marketing generates more sales and profits than it costs to produce you earn a marketing win. If it doesn’t produce enough to cover expenses, it’s a marketing loss. Most business owners have no idea if their marketing is winning or losing. They make the mistake of running ads and promotions and hope one of them will eventually pay off. In the marketing game, hope is not a strategy!

Playing the game can be very aggravating. Your most clever and well planned marketing plays may fail miserably. But you cannot give up and quit playing the game. Every business, no matter their size or stature, experiences marketing losses – think of the infamous “New Coke” or the Edsel fiascoes.

Last time I checked, Coca-Cola and Ford are still in business and spending millions on marketing. Both learned from their mistakes, returned to the fundamentals and tried different direction. So must you!