Social Business Plans

Marketing - an introduction

What is marketing? When we ask this question in the Monkey Business seminars that we run, people often come up with words like:

flyers, websites, promotion, advertising

They're not wrong - but they're not 100% right either. Those things listed above are often the visible signs of marketing - but the marketing process starts much earlier - with your market research.

There are countless definitions of marketing, and here are two that we like:

Every contact you make with customers, suppliers and staff

The whole business seen from the customer's point of view

The first definition is easy to understand, whilst the second is a bit more abstract - courtesy of one of the great management thinkers Peter Drucker. He also said something which acts as a good reminder of the value of good marketing:

The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself

It's worth reflecting on this statement. Note that he doesn't say that marketing is primarily about selling. It's primarily about understanding your customer - and if you do that, your product or service will sell itself. The worst thing you can do is spend money on promotional tools like flyers and websites, without understanding who your customer is. This is why market research is so important, and why we offer our own definition of marketing (which we've probably subconsciously pinched from someone else):

Building relationships with customers

In our Monkey Business workshop, we take you through five stages of marketing. We'll look at those stages in the next blog.

Successful marketing - in five steps

You'll find lots of different approaches to marketing, but here's what works for us.

We suggest that there are five stages to marketing:

Identify your market
Research your market
Divide your customer base into groups (often called segmentation)
Develop your marketing mix
Work out how to communicate with your customers

To help you to work out what market you are in, have a look at the blog entry we wrote on this subject, which talks about trying to answer the question:

What does our customer need?

Then, once you've worked out what market you are in, you need to research your market.

As part of your market research, you will focus on customers, and may well find it useful to segment your customer base - ie break down your customers into groups which have common characteristics.

Once you've done that, you can then work out how to tailor your service to meet the needs of each customer segment. You tailor your service by developing a marketing mix for each set of customers - which we'll look at in more detail in the next blog.

Your marketing mix

Once you've done some work on understanding who your customers are, you can then think about how you are going to tailor your service or product to meet the needs of your customers. In other words, you can develop your marketing mix - a unique blend of:

Product Price Promotion & Place

These are often called the 4 P's of Marketing.

Basically, the 4 P's represent the things that you are in control of, and can vary, in order to best meet the needs of your customers. In our Monkey Business workshop, we take the example of car insurance company Sheilas' Wheels to demonstrate how you can develop a strong marketing mix. Here's a brief outline of what we think Sheilas Wheels' marketing mix is:

Product (or service): Their product (car insurance) is aimed specifically at women. They have tailored their product supposedly to meet the needs of women drivers. For example, their policy includes handbag cover - in place of the standard contents insurance. The rationale is that women carry more valuables in their handbags (which may be left on the back seat) than a man does in his wallet.

Price: They reckon that because they only insure women, (who are safer drivers than men) that their insurance is cheaper than that provided by other companies. It's an interesting proposal, which is backed up to a certain extent by evidence. They offer a 10% discount if you buy online. Other things to think about when considering your price include how people can pay you - eg in instalments/up front/with 30 days credit.

Promotion: Sheilas' Wheels has a very strong brand backed up by a vigorous promotional campaign, with lots of TV, radio and magazine advertising - obviously targeted at publications and programmes which women are likely to watch. They've also cleverly aligned themselves with women through PR exercises around the dangers of identity theft from handbags and sponsorship of a women's stand-up comedy event on International Women's Day.

Place: this is about where you choose to sell. Sheilas' Wheels promote their product as being primarily available online - and offer a discount for online sales. Clearly, their target market - car-owning women of working age - will be regular internet users. If they were targetting a customer group who were not heavy internet users (for example the over-75s), they may need to find another way to sell their product, for example through high-street brokers.

So, it's worth thinking about how to tailor your marketing mix to meet the needs of your customers. You won't have the resources that the owners of Sheilas' Wheels, HBOS, have, but the principles are the same. To help you, we've come up with a monkey-nutshell marketing plan, which we'll look at next.

Your monkey-nutshell marketing plan

Marketing can appear very complicated, but at its heart it's very simple - as Peter Drucker pointed out:

The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.

To try to keep things simple, we offer our monkey-nutshell marketing plan - which outlines on one page the questions you need to ask yourself in order to develop long-term relationships with your customers. You can download a blank monkey-nutshell marketing plan here:

Download Monkeynutshellplan

The questions we suggest that you need to ask yourself are:

Our customer – who are they and what do we know about them? Your market research - and your customer segmentation - should help you to answer this question.

What service are we offering to them? You may have a variety of services or products, and may choose to offer them a particular one. For example, in our case we might offer a ten-session social business planning course to one group of customers, and a three-day residential to another group - depending on what their needs are.

What are the key features of our service? (remember product, price and place). This is where you outline the nuts and bolts of what you are going to offer.

What benefits will they gain from our service? In other words, what will the features do for them? Think particularly about what social needs will be met. The basic theory here is that customers tend to buy benefits, not features. Features are factual (eg a 1.6 litre engine on a car) whilst benefits answer the what's in it for me? question (eg a comfortable ride on the motorway). Here's a good article explaining the difference between features and benefits.

What messages do we want to give them? The basic rule here is sell the benefits - in other words help your customer to answer the what's in it for me? question. Think about what your messages will be - before you spend money on getting the messages across.

How are we going to get our messages across? This is the bit we traditionally think of as marketing. What are you going to do to communicate with customers? Remember the earlier definition of marketing - every contact you have with customers, suppliers and staff. So it's not just about flyers and websites - although they may be useful. It's also about how you answer the phone, how you talk to customers, etc etc.

Once you've answered all of these questions, you should be able to market your business!

Monkey Business

We run a marketing workshop called Monkey Business. We take inspiration from the Arctic Monkeys - those cheeky Sheffield boys who last year released the fastest selling debut album of all time.

They very cleverly (and cheaply) built up strong relationships with their fans - and realised that often the best way of marketing your business is to get your customers to do your marketing on your behalf. In the music industry myspace is used a lot by bands to share music and keep in touch with fans - here's the myspace page for 3milehigh a band one of my friends is in.

To get a taste of Monkey Business, have a read of an article I wrote about it in Social Enterprise Magazine. You can also download a pdf of my Monkey Business presentation below. If you'd be interested in coming on a Monkey Business seminar please email me.

Download monkeybusiness28feb.pdf

Strategic marketing advice from Jerr Boschee

Here's some interesting reading courtesy of Jerr Boschee from the US Institute for Social Entrepreneurs

Download JerrBoscheestrategicmarketing.pdf

How to write a press release

There's a very good article here about how to write a press release. It's from Wiki-how - so you're free to pass it on as long as you acknowledge them.

Online marketing cheat sheet for social entrepreneurs

Here's a link to more information about online marketing via the Skoll Foundation.

Monkey Nutshell Marketing Plan Presentation

Here's my quick introduction to marketing - delivered at an UnLtd Awards event on 2 September.

Monkey Nutshell Marketing - for UnLtd

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: marketing social)