Steel Town Promotions - Bringing you potential consumers

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Owning a business is not just about selling your product, it involves strategic planning. Your Company standing, the quality of your product, customer dealings, and word of mouth advertising are important, but these alone are probably not enough to grow your business. Your company's name and product needs to stand out from your competitors. To do this you must realize the important elements of marketing and advertising to your company's success.

All successful business owners understand that strategic planning includes evaluating their business goals every two to five years. Once the Company's strategic plans and goals have been implemented, a commitment to the plan and building on it should be ongoing. Part of this ongoing commitment includes understanding the difference between marketing and advertising, and setting your goals and objectives accordingly.

Marketing

Marketing can be defined as the process, overall strategy, and function of selling a product. It is the link between material needs and wants of a particular group or industry and the economic patterns of that group or industry. This includes creating, delivering, and communicating the value of your product to customers, and managing customer relationships in ways that benefit your business. Marketing also includes the science of targeting markets through market analysis and market segmentation, as well as understanding consumer buying behaviors while providing superior customer value.

Successful marketing management involves, developing marketing strategies and plans, and creating short and long term goals. It will be important to consider company growth, marketing insights, and developing a means to communicate and deliver the value of your product to your customers. The process of communicating and delivering the value of a product or service to customers is called advertising.

Advertising

There are many different approaches to advertising. Customer focus groups, market changes, and product innovation are just a few. That said, the most important aspect of advertising is recognizing your audience and staying within your marketing and advertising budget.

Customer Orientation

Many companies today have a customer orientation group. This implies that the company focuses its activities and products on consumer demands. Generally there are three ways of doing this; the Consumer Driven Approach, Identifying Market Changes, and the Product Innovative Approach.

In the Consumer Driven Approach

The consumer's wants and needs is the driver to all strategic marketing decisions. No strategies should be pursued until it passes the test of consumer research. Every aspect of market offering, including the nature of the product itself, is driven by the needs of the potential customer. The rationale for this approach is that there is no point spending funds developing products that no one will buy. History can attest to the many products that failed in spite of being technological breakthroughs.

The Formal Approach

The Formal Approach to this customer focused marketing is known as SIVA or Solution, Information, Value, and Access and it is based on customer demand.

* Solution: What is the product need and how appropriate is the solution or answer to the customer's want or need?
* Information:Does the customer know about the solution: If so, how and from whom? Where did they get their information from? Do they know enough to let them make a buying decision?
* Value:Does the customer know the value of the transaction, what will it cost? What are the benefits? What might they have to sacrifice? What will be their reward?
* Access:Where can the customer find the solution? How easily can they buy the product and take delivery of it?

The SIVA model focuses heavily on the customer and how they view the product and the transaction.

Product Innovative Approach

In the product innovation approach, the company pursues product innovation and then tries to develop a market for it. Product innovation drives the process, and marketing research is conducted primarily to ensure that a profitable market segment exists for the innovation. However, marketers can aggressively over pursue product innovation and try to over capitalize. There should be a varied and multitiered approach to product innovation.

Steel Town Promotions

Your catering business started out as a dream. You worked hard to make your dream a reality. Today, keeping your dream alive is harder than ever before. Getting and keeping quality customers must be your top priority. The most important thing that you can do for your business is to advertise and promote it, even during a recession. The caterer who stops advertising to save money is like the man who stops the clock to save time. It won't work.

Advertising will take a big chunk out of your project margin, unless you can find a way to be creative and get your name out there for free.One idea as to how to do this is to team up with other small business owners. Go to companies that are not your competitors and ask them if you can put your fliers in their windows and business cards on their counters if you promise to do the same for them in return. You will be surprised at how many cross over clients that will come your way.

Another example of free advertisement is handing out coupons or samples depending on your business. People love to feel like they are getting a bargain, so a well thought out coupon strategy can bring in new customers. Just be careful you don't fall into the trap of competing on price alone. It's a fast way to go broke.

If you are more of an internet savvy person then the countless ways to advertise for free online will keep you happy. You can tap into social media sites and let billion dollar companies like Google, Facebook and LinkedIn spread your good name to potential catering customers at zero cost to you. Just being on these social media sites is not enough. You need to have a strategic presence on the web. Learn as much as you can about these free sites and put your social media marketing plan in action.



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