Practical Marketing in Ten Easy Questions

by Mark Nagurski, April 30th, 2008

“I don’t know the answers - but I do know the right questions to ask.”

Despite what the textbooks might tell you, you don’t need to know an awful lot about marketing to be able to get fantastic results. Smart marketers don’t know all the answers - but they do know the right questions to ask.

In fact, once you know the questions, the answers themselves can be surprisingly obvious. More importantly, when you understand how you arrived at the answer in the first place, you’ll also understand how to improve your marketing in the future - getting better results and spending comparatively less money in the process.

The really good news is that the important questions are pretty much the same no matter what industry you’re in or what kind of business you run.

So, over the next few weeks we’ll be giving you an insight into how to develop a winning marketing strategy for your business by using ten simple questions.

Ten Simple Marketing Questions You Need to Ask

Why would someone buy from me? - Every business has something that makes it unique. It can be the product, the service, the location or even the owner. If there’s no unique reason someone would buy from your business, then they’ll probably stick with what they’re doing already. You need to find what’s unique about you and make it central to your business.
Who are my most likely customers and what do they really want? - You can’t market to everyone - it’s too expensive for one thing. You need to prioritise your possible customers and focus your efforts on attracting them. So, with your answer from the first question in hand, you need to decide who’s most likely to respond to whatever it is that makes you unique. Once you know who they are, you can start learning a bit more about them.
What marketing message should I use? Now you know who you are, and who your customers are, your message becomes “I can give you what you want” - you’ll want a better way of putting it though - and ways to prove it.
Is my message consistent? Does everything about your business create the same impression and deliver the same message? Does it all appeal to your most likely customer?
Do I have a strong central offer? Your offer is simply a way of saying, ‘try us and this is what we will do for you’. To make it compelling you should ask, ‘what can I do that will make choosing me as simple as possible?’
How can I get my message and offer to my most likely customers? That’s all marketing is, so you’ll need a list of possible methods to accomplish it.
What marketing methods are likely to be cost-effective? The key here is cost-effective, not cheap. A cost-effective marketing method will allow you to communicate your message and offer to your most likely customer. It will also give you definite return on your investment within an acceptable period of time, i.e. if you spend £100 on an ad you want more than £100 in new business from it. Use your list of all the methods you could use and score them against these 3 criteria - message, right target customers and getting your money back in a reasonable amount of time.
Is my marketing working? - Once you have started marketing, you need to know what’s working and what’s not. To do that you’ll need ways of tracking the results.
Why would someone refer or talk about my business? People do things for a reason. Figure out why people would talk about and refer your business and then give them more reasons to do it. You can also find reasons why they wouldn’t - and ways to remove those obstacles.
How do I get even more customers? There are only ever two answers to this question. You can either keep doing the same - but more of it - in which case you need to know why your existing customers use you and make sure there are plenty more customers like them out there. Or, you can do something different, in which case you need to repeat some of the questions from above and find new ways to be unique and new likely customers to speak to.

So where do the answers come from? Simple - you can steal them, ask for them or make them up.

Stealing answers: There are two great ways of stealing answers to your marketing questions. Firstly, you can read literally hundreds of ideas and examples in marketing books, articles and online resources. Secondly, you can ‘be inspired by’ (i.e. steal) marketing from other successful businesses. The best bet is to find businesses in different markets to you but who share something in common, i.e. same type of customer or same industry but in a different city.

Ask for answers: A lot of your answers will be based on what the customer really wants. If you don’t know, why not ask them? The entire market research industry is based on this one simple idea.

Make them up: Sometimes you won’t know where to find the answer you need. In that case, make your best educated guess, test the results and then make changes appropriately. There’s nothing wrong with trial and error so long as you keep the trials small and fix the errors quickly.

If you get good enough at asking and answering the right questions, you’ll always have the tools to market your business effectively - no matter what type, size or shape of business it is.