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Every upstart business is afraid of starting out. Any business venture seems scary and overwhelming, and even more so is the marketing technique that it requires to get the business up the social ladder. Here are the 9 basic Marketing Principles—the 9 questions I’ve come up with in this post, to aid all those business persons who want a guide to help them find a starting point for their business.

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Are You A Business Firm and are here for These Marketing Principles?

Are you a business firm?

Okay, let me rephrase that question.

Are you someone who indulges in the sale of products or exchange of services, of any kind, or trading information or ideas, or experiences or events?

Or maybe you aren’t doing this yet, but are planning to soon enough.

Because anyone who does that, performs commercial activity, or—in general sense—remains “busy”—is operating a business.

The next question would be—are you marketing your business the right way? Are you working towards making your business a bigger brand that can reach a wider audience? You probably are, no doubt. Every entrepreneur wants the best for their business. They spend hours correcting their policies and strategies to reach more customers and attract new audience

But did you focus on these 9 business Marketing Principles that would help you know your business on a richer level, and also prompt you for what you further need to work and improve on?

If not, here are the 9 questions you need to answer, both for yourself and your brand, to help it grow on a global platform and get rewards for all your hardworking days.

#1 What do the Customers Want?

There is little difference between need and want.

Need is a basic necessity, it’s what all human beings require by default. Want is related to a particular product or object that satisfies that need.

Taking a common example: people need a phone, but some of them might want an iPhone. People need food, but some of them want pizza. So this was the difference between “need” and “want” that you probably already knew about.

Furthermore, demand is the “want of a product backed up by the ability to buy.”

If the consumers have the money to buy what they want, it creates a demand for that product in the market. Now, this was the basic knowledge.

So how do we use it to our requirements? For our business to immediately recognize a growing want to satisfy a particular need in the market, our business needs to be equipped with the conditions prevailing in the market.

We need to figure out what the consumers want.

In marketing, we basically find out (or create) the general needs of the customers then design products that are up to the mark for those needs.

These products gives rise to “wants” for our products in the minds of the customers. And since they’ll see how they are getting their wants satisfied from a particular product, they’ll start demanding it.

And it all began with knowing what our customers wanted.

Briefly restated, you need to make the customers see what they need, then make them want it from you. And demand of your products will ensue.

#2 What is your Target Market?

You can’t hope to spread your reach globally without a target audience in mind.

This old saying kind of resonated with it— “A friend of all is a friend of none.” Maybe it doesn’t strike as much to you as it does to me, but all it says is how you need to keep in mind who you want to please.

So, you can’t spread your business without a target audience in mind. There must be a group of customers whose needs fit best into what products or services your offer.

This is so because all of us have grown up in different psychological, geographical or cultural environments, and not all of us like the same cars, food, entertainment, or music. Because everyone had different factors shaping their mindset, everyone has different wants, and hence, a business needs to find the densest market for itself (where a large number of customers liking their product reside) and this would become their target market.

Once the target market is determined, the business starts the marketing procedure, and looks deeper into the demographic patterns of this target market, and then position (or alter, if need be) their business in a way that suits the customers.

Google realised the needs of the customers for all the information stacked in one place, available in an efficient and accessible way. It overtook Yahoo!

It didn’t create a need. It recognized it. And it did it like a pro.

In a glance: While doing business you need to remember one thing. If you set out to please all, you’ll end up pleasing none.

#3 What do you Offer your Customers; and have you Developed your Brand Image?

Your services or products must benefit the customers in some way.

Any business addresses a group of customer’s needs by putting something forward that satisfies their needs. This intangible set of benefits is termed as value proposition and is converted into the tangible form of offerings—or simply, offer.

Your offer can be a combination of products, services and information that you can efficiently provide within your expertise and line of business.

Needless to say, in a world of globalization and wider scope of advertisement and marketing, there’s a huge competition prevailing in a market place. Our offer should be exciting and attractive to stand out.

That brings us to our second point—our brand. How far are we up that building-the-brand road? Do people recognize us or are we not there yet? Do we have goodwill yet?

Obviously we all want to build our business into something bigger (a brand), but it seems so difficult to do so when we are new and upstart business people, who are trying to thrive in a competitive market.

In this post, however I won’t go into a detailed study of brand—construction and marketing, but building a brand is the most essential requisite of a business, and thus, you can’t dispense with giving your time and energy to it.

Everything that you, as a business, do, should lead your customers back to the brand. They should see a brand logo and get to know what you do (either through other customers, your website, or marketing campaigns) and they should be driven to keep coming back for more.

This is what a brand does—it gives you a name, a title, and when the next time the customers need you, they should be typing that exact same title, and be led to your wordplace.

#4 What Marketing Channels have you set up?

To reach the desired market, a marketer makes use of three kinds of marketing channels.

Communication channel sets up communication (delivering and receiving of message from target buyers) and these include newspapers, magazines, radio, television, mails, telephone etc. This can also be done through internet-based facilities, as it is mainly done in today’s fast developing world—with the use of website, emails, blogs and more.

Distribution channel is through which you display, sell or deliver a physical product or service to the customer or user. This can be done online (via telephone, internet, or the mail) or through offline channels (they are the intermediaries, such as wholesalers, retailers etc.)

Service channel aids to carry out transactions with buyers. These include all the auxiliaries to trade, such as banking, insurance, warehousing. A business needs these to provide easily accessible services to customers.

Now the questions arises—which of these channels have you set up or want to, and are working efficiently? Is there any scope left for any? How can you work on making this better?

#5 What kind of Media do you/would you use to Interact with Customers?

There are 3 kinds of media: paid media, earned media and owned media.

These are the various ways for businesses to interact with the consumers and advertise their product or service.

Print media: Includes mass communication of information as is in the case of magazine, newspaper, display ads, sponsorships etc.

Owned media: These are the communication channels that the businesses own, and the marketers use this to advertise the item. They include websites social media accounts, and the company’s own brochures.

Earned media: This is when the customers spread the good word around. This type of media involves the consumers, or press, deciding to promote the brand by spreading word about it among their friends and associates.

Now which of these three media are you willing to use for promotion and advertising? Or are you aiming towards all? What will you use in the future? Decide according to the size of your business and carefully look at the pros and cons.

Keep these questions in mind.

#6 Have you Mapped out your Supply Chain?

Supply chain is the channel between raw materials and finished products that supplies them from the ground producers all the way to the final buyers.

It includes all the intermediaries and looks something like this.

Supply chains are important and determine the course of business. Supply chains can be damaging or even fatal for business, if not mapped out carefully. So make sure yours is clearly set up in your mind.

#7 What is your Competition?

It is very important to know your competition in business, and to be updated on what they are doing.

It’s like keep your enemies close. And if we come to look at it—the business firms which sell the same products that we do—attracting the same group of potential buyers, are our enemy. Sorta.

At least we don’t want them to gobble our firm up.

Not every line of business has competitors—at least those that we should actively dislike. But wherever substitute goods come into the picture, so does competition.

Demand of a consumer highly depends on price of the given good, but it also depends on the price of related goods (both substitute and complement goods).

Here we’ll talk about substitute goods only, because they affect demand directly. If the price of a substitute good goes down—demand of the given good goes down too. So if your competitor reduced the price of their product, consumers will be attracted towards them, and that won’t look good for you.

That is why, it is necessary to know what competition is there in the market so we can formulate policies to overcome it.

#8 Do you Recognize your Marketing Environment?

There are two components of marketing environment.

Task environment: Includes those people engaged in producing, promoting and distributing the product/ offer. These can include the company that produces and promotes, suppliers and distributors that distribute, dealers and the buyers.

This environment also includes all the auxiliaries to trade (as suppliers): banking and insurance, telecom, transportation and all others who facilitate the delivery of service to the customers.

Broad environment: Has six components, namely, natural environment, demographic, socio-cultural, economic, political and technological environment. Briefly these are the environments that surround us and our work in daily life.

Now marketers need to pay close attention to these marketing environments and any changes happening within them. Marketing strategies are thus adjusted as needed and seen fit.

Because the world of business is a fast changing and highly volatile world, new opportunities arise every day and old ideas get outdated. Marketers have to look at these emerging business opportunities and await the right moment to employ them.

#9 Does your Business Provide Value and Satisfaction?

The buyer is only liable to choose a product that offers him or her value in some form or other.

Value is—in business—the combination of tangible or intangible benefits. It, a central marketing concept, is defined by quality, service, and price (called the customer value triad).

The better the quantity and service, the better are the value perceptions.

But as price also increases, of course, the customer’s estimation of value starts falling. Satisfaction reflects the person’s experience and how well do they like it compared to their expectation.

Was the product up to mark? If it was, the customer was satisfied. If it crossed the mark, the customer is delighted. But if it falls short of the customers expectations, the customer—is, of course—disappointed.

Marketing relates to this knowledge of identifying, creating, promoting, distributing and monitoring the customer value and then estimating how they can increase the customer satisfaction.

Conclusion

Okay, so these were the nine marketing questions I feel every startup should ask itself, just to make sure it’s gone through all the requisites of starting a business and being new in the field.

Sometimes people feel very overwhelmed and anxious for entering the world of business. These business tycoons were, after all, the monsters their parents had once told them about.

And entering the business world can be both exciting and scary.

When we are first beginners, then all of us think that we won’t survive.

But as you will survive and your business will emerge out of the shadows (though slowly), then you’ll start to see it for yourself that it is hard, but it isn’t impossible.

After all, everyone started small. Even those that have made it big, started teensy-meensy small.

What if you are just one of them?

Furthermore, if you aren’t currently in a business and are working a 9-5 job in a boring company with an arrogant boss whom you don’t like, and you want to get out of the rut your life has become, I sincerely suggest you reading this: You Probably Have a Good Salary, but are You Wealthy? In this blog post, I tell you one thing probably no one ever told you about finance and money management. I tell you how wealth is created.

Let’s talk!

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