Learning the Basics in Marketing

A successful business comes with a well-planned marketing strategy. Marketing is already used by an individual in his daily life though some may not be aware about it. Just mere grooming of oneself to create an impression is already a form of marketing. Therefore it will not be so hard for someone to employ marketing in his business. Business failures sometimes occur because of poor marketing. The first big step in creating a marketing plan is of course to learn the basics in marketing. However, what really is marketing? Marketing is more than just generating sales. It’s the series of activities done to make sales. Marketing is to get the awareness of the target customers about someone’s product, to encourage them to buy and to let them patronize the product. There are only two fundamental steps in marketing your product.

First and foremost, you have to determine your target market. Target market is the people you want to reach. A businessman has to consider the target market's demographic, geographic and psychographic characteristics. Demographic characteristic pertains to the age, education, income, sex and the like of the target market while geographic is the location where you can find them and psychographic is all about the lifestyle characteristics of the target market such as hobbies and interests. This would help you identify who would benefit from your product, what type of promotional tool would suit them and where you can actually find them.

For new products, there is a theory that there are diverse groups of people wherein each has different risk tolerances. The innovators who are only 5% to 10% adopt your products first because they enjoy trying new things and tend to be venturesome. The early adopters who are the next 10-15% of the population are the careful choosers of new products. They are viewed as the people to check with by people in the remaining adopter categories. Early majority, the next 30% are those people adopting new products just before the average person. They deliberate and are cautious in trying new products. The late majority comes next, is the next 30% and includes skeptics who adopt new products when they feel it is necessary. Lastly, the laggards are the remaining 20% who are the last adopters because they do not trust new products, and when they finally adopt the innovation, it may have been replaced by a new product.

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