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!