Strategic Marketing

Tony Ajah

Marketing is a very serious activity and the central part of every business. It is your ability to win in the marketplace that makes you a true business winner. Most business failures known to me are mainly those relating to the market or marketing.
The subject of marketing is becoming harder as the competition is becoming fiercer. ‘If you don’t have a competitive advantage’, Jack Welch warned, ‘don’t compete’. And my finest advice is: go strategic and grab the best market-share. ‘If there’s one thing people strive for in marketing, it’s to be understood; an understanding that would lead to closing a deal. Yet that purpose has not been achieved by many marketers and business people.
Each business day opens us up to other sides of marketing or the market that we possibly may not have thought of before. I didn’t know about marketing before as much as I know now an experience which had come with time and constant exposure. And if we fail to adapt quickly to current marketing challenges, we might be out of business tomorrow. So, we have to deal with the marketing situations the way they are, and not the way we wished they were.
Marketing, like business is a game of strategy. John Collins saw this many years ago and remarked, ‘Competing in the market place is like war. You have injuries and casualties, and the best strategy wins’. Interestingly, strategies are worked out based on the market realities. You can’t win in a game you haven’t defined with facts. Can you?
I don’t know the size of your present market-share but there are more out there for grabs than what you have in your kitty at the moment. The heart of this piece of writing is to find ways of converting your prospective buyers to true buyers, who would always be buying time and time again until their loyalties are established. How then do we device a strategy to convert and add prospects into an existing customer-base? This is what this work would focus on in a nutshell.

Marketing: Another Definition
Marketing is a combination of logic, emotion and creativity. It means understanding people what they want and how you can hand it over to them (doesn’t matter what your product/service is). A good understanding of who is buying helps you to build the right platforms to achieving your marketing objective.
I have come to realise that marketing is the point you reach when you are busy connecting with your prospective buyers (bearing in mind his or her unique personalities). I have closed more deals using this method than any other method known to me. That is to say, marketing is not about understanding the market as it were; it’s about understanding people and their individual needs and styles, and meeting them. If marketing is what you do to attract and to keep customers in your business, then knowing the person that you want to attract becomes fundamental to the marketing business.

Marketing and the Buyers’ Personalities
As people differ, so are the strategies for reaching them. Resolving this earlier would give you access into their ‘comfort-zone’, the zone where every buying decision is made.
To achieve success in marketing, you must develop what I tag ‘personality flexibility’. And flexibility is your ability and willingness to adapt to the situation, as well as to the individuals with whom you are marketing your product/services to. Without it, you might likely be less effective to positively influence your buyer(s).Here’s what I mean by that: if your prospect cannot buy your product/service standing, don’t try selling it to him when he is standing up. This idea, which I called ‘market-mirroring’, works like magic. Has it not happened to you? When you are in a hurry you want anybody coming to see you at that time to hurry up; same is true when you are not. Whenever we move at people’s pace and frequency, we tend to get them to our side.
A pretty understanding of who is buying helps you to build the right platform to achieving your purpose. You short-change yourself whenever you don’t know who you are marketing to, and that’s one of the main reasons only few marketers ever close a deal. But knowing who you are marketing your product/service to sets a clear tone for the rest of the transaction to reach a conclusive end (that would make you smile). Whatever it might cost you, endeavour to know appreciably your buyers make-up. For instance, his personality and communication style, and then channel your product-service to meeting his unique needs, or better still his uniqueness. As we are different, so are our needs, tastes, expectations, drives, desires and wants. And they are part of us, and shouldn’t be played down whenever we relate with people, especially during selling or marketing of any kind.

Be a ‘Market Psychologist’
In psychoanalysis, if you allow a person to talk about himself freely, he will eventually blurt out what he is really thinking about at that moment. I have noticed that psychologists spend greater part of their counselling time listening. Little wonder they provide solutions to whatever bugs their clients. You too can do the same in marketing. Always listen to your buyers. And when you do that, you create the kind of environment that makes the buyer feel comfortable to express himself openly and honestly. At this point, you can know how to help them better, or more clearly stated, market them successfully.
Let me give you some clues: ask enough intelligent questions, and listen closely enough to answers that follow in order to understand the most intense needs of a particular prospect which your product/service could satisfy. In other words, question skillfully and listen carefully. Closed ears are closed opportunities. We miss opportunities when we fail to listen attentively.

Market Your Product/Service Benefits
I would be dwelling a little more on this; it appears to be pivotal to this whole topic. According to Brian Tracy, ‘the best sales presentation shows the prospect how much better-off he will be if he buys and simultaneously how much worse-off he will be if he neglects to buy.’ This is very remarkable. Every human action in purchasing of a product/service is aimed at an improvement of some kind. People buy certain items because they feel they will be better off as a result. They also feel they will be better off if they bought some other product/service, or if they bought nothing at all. It is only when the customer feels that the value he receives is greater in excess of the cost that he will have to pay that a buying decision takes place. If you are still in doubt, think about the last product that you bought.
People don’t buy products, they buy benefits. They buy solutions to their problems, the ways to satisfy their needs. It is your duty to bridge the gap between what they want and what you have. You must always talk about your product/service in terms of what the customer wants, and not in terms of what you are marketing and want him to perceive. It’s very unfortunate that most marketing focus on the product-service features rather than benefits. I have had a couple of people come to me with their products; they fail to make sales simply because of this marketing blunder. I was once like that until I got the secret and my story changed. While features might arouse interest, it’s the benefits that establish buying desire.
There is a key benefit that the prospect is seeking. His no, is not an answer. Whenever you hear no, it means that you have not uncovered the benefit (except that he is not in need of that particular product/service). There is one thing that he must be convinced of before he can buy. It behoves on you to convince the buyer that he will enjoy this benefit if he buys your product/service. Perhaps the primary thing here is the difference between what your product/service is and what it does. But the prospect cares less about what your product/service is; he only cares about what it does, especially what it can do for him.
Always remember that benefit, like quality and value, is subjective. And subjectivity is guided by perception. Create a channel to influence people’s perceptions based on what matters most to them. Every product/service is really the packaging of a problem-solving service. The marketer’s responsibility is to uncover the needs hiding under the product/service and sell the benefits to the buyers. You have no business marketing a product/service whose different benefits you know nothing about. Let me say it again, people don’t buy your product/service, they buy the result; they buy ‘what’s in it for me’. They buy solutions to their problems. If you don’t care about that, I do; same with countless others.

Pose as a Friend
A man once quipped, ‘when people feel that someone genuinely likes them, they are more open to listening to that person and to buying what he/she is selling’. Make your prospects feel more comfortable and relaxed buying from you. It’s wisdom to approach every marketing situation as a friend; it’s a skill that can be acquired. Influencing the action of your prospect becomes easier when he sees you as a trusted friend. You should endeavour to achieve this in your first meeting. It all lies in your relational posture with him or her. Marketing research has it that a prospect will not buy from you until he is convinced that you are his/her friend and that you are acting in his or her best interest.
There is more to state than this space can take. You’ve got enough to get you started. Meet and exceed that target, explore new marketing grounds with ease. It’s a new day for you as you take those product/services to the ultimate buyers, giving them what they want. It’s up to you to make that happen!

Tony Ajah is a business growth strategist, and the Principal Strategist, TA Strategic Solutions, a Lagos-based firm into business growth and development. He can be reached at tony@ta-strategies.com ajahxt@yahoo.co.uk 01 958 7802