What is marketing anyway?

There are various definitions of marketing out there, there is the CIM (Chartered Institute of Marketing) definition “Marketing is the management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably.” , and there are the 4Ps Marketing Mix “Product, Price, Promotion, and Place”, and there are the 3 further Ps “People, Process and Physical evidence”  (you can tell by this point they were struggling to stick with “P”s).

Ultimately, marketing is about understanding your target market and making a profit from it. This may sound simple, but most companies get to a point where they need help with this. There have always been people, such as Steve Jobs, who clearly had the knack for it, but most of us have had to study hard and learn through experience to really understand how to implement marketing. That doesn’t mean every business needs a marketing department, but most will need some expert input at some point to help grow the business and the brand (more about “brand” here), even if it is simply working with an agency or a freelancer from time to time.

So, where does marketing start and end?

I like to use PR Smith’s SOSTAC^® Plan¹ as it is a vey useful marketing planning tool but it is also a good way to check if you have missed anything out. SOSTAC^® stands for Situation, Objectives, Strategy, Tactics, Action and Control. Here are the steps and some ideas about how I use them in a B2B context covering all 4 (or 7) Ps.

Situation is figuring out where you are now. This could be a full PEST analysis (Political/Legal, Economic, Social, Technological) of the whole business, it could be how the sales of a particular product or service is performing and why, it could be research into a new market you want to penetrate, it could be your customer satisfaction levels etc. (you get the idea). The answers here will help you decide what your objectives are.

Objectives are just as essential whether you are putting a detailed marketing plan together, or you are planning a simple email campaign. If you don’t have objectives, how can you know what to do to achieve your goals or if you have achieved them? Objectives can be monetary, but they don’t have to be. It might be the objectives you need to achieve to reach your sales goals (e.g. growing your customer contact base, increasing web visitors, number or click-throughs in an email, increased customer satisfaction etc.) but they must all be “SMART” Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound.

Strategy is where you start to work out how you are going to achieve your objectives. You are not defining specific actions here but working out where your over-all focus should be. For example, it might be the pricing strategy you need to implement to achieve your sales targets, it might be whether you are going to sell direct to your end user or trade via distributor (place), it might be your Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning (who your target audience is and how to satisfy them) etc.

Tactics are the specific actions withinn the 4Ps Marketing Mix you need to identify, that fit with your over-all strategy and will help you achieve your objectives. This could be actions from the promotional mix, such as an advertising campaign or a brochure, it could be launching a new product or re-purposing an existing one for a new market, it could be deciding which partners you should be working with to distribute your product. There is an enormous list of potential tactics but if you have effectively covered the previous three steps this should all fall into place.

Action is all about ensuring excellent execution of the planned tactics (internal marketing). To do this you have to get into the real detail of who does what when and what systems should be in place to enable the tactics chosen. For example, do you use an external resource to run a campaign or do you do it in-house?, how do you approach potential partners and distributors (is it best coming from a director or are your sales team able to seal the deal)?, what method are you going to use to do a customer survey?, what system or systems are you going to use to send and measure your marketing emails? etc.

Control is about making sure that your actions are effective and that changes can be made quickly if it doesn’t look like you are going to meet your objectives. To do this you need to keep an eye on your KPIs and other goals. For example, are you getting enough visitors to your website to meet your online sales objectives, are you getting enough leads to convert into the number of sales you need to win, are your customer satisfaction levels on track, have you got the number of distributors on board you should after 6 months etc.? You monitor until your time-bound objectives expire and ultimately see if you have achieved them. You then take the learning from this and it is fed back onto the “situation” stage so you can start all over again and hopefully do it even better next time.

3 Ms (Men & Women, Money, Minutes): Alongside PR Smith’s SOTSTAC^®, his 3Ms are used to help you decide what you can realistically include in your plan, and once you have completed the plan, look at what resources you should set aside to carry it out. You need to consider the human resources you have available (Men & Women), how much you can invest (Money) and how much time you have to carry out your plan (Minutes).

Too important to be left to the marketing department

As the Co-founder of HP, David Packard once famously said “Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department”. You may have noticed from the above that you are already doing marketing – or at least a good chunk of it. Marketing is the responsibility of everyone in the company to some degree, but the marketing professionals are there to make sure that the ship is being steered in the right direction. Whether they are internal or external, marketing professionals should have the best understanding of your customer’s wants and needs, how to meet those needs and wants (in a way that makes the business profit) and how to reach them with the right message and be the ultimate guardians of your brand.

For more help marketing your B2B business contact me on 07791 521439 or at samantha@labrakita.co.uk

Author: Samantha Tonge, Marketing Consultant, Labrakita Marketing

 

¹ SOSTAC^® is a registered trademark of PR Smith. For more information on SOSTAC^® Planning & becoming a SOSTAC^® Certified Planner visit www.SOSTAC.org.  Also see: Smith, PR (2012) 4 min video explaining SOSTAC^® PLanning framework and Smith, PR (2019) SOSTAC® Guide to your Perfect Digital Marketing Plan.