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To build a solid foundation for your young venture’s marketing efforts, start with these strategies to guide your path forward.
First and foremost, marketing is an ongoing relationship between your business and your customers. Therefore, it is important to constantly nurture and optimize your marketing efforts as your venture matures.
On the surface, marketing is any effort you make to attract an audience that purchases or participates in your product. You can do this through traditional channels–direct mail, billboards, and radio–or digital channels–email, social media, and display ads.
If you pursue entrepreneurship long enough, however, you’ll realize that marketing is a journey of trial and error that ultimately leads to understanding your customer inherently throughout all stages of the marketing funnel.
If you want to market your business, organization, or other venture effectively, you must first understand your product so you can understand who you’re marketing it to.
Crafting a Value Proposition
Your business has a better chance of success if you can demonstrate the benefits of what you’re offering in a clear and concise way that answers the question, “Why us instead of them?” Your unique value proposition, or UVP, should address the following:
To craft a value prop, you can use this template:
[COMPANY] sells [X, Y, Z] so that [AUDIENCE] can [BENEFITS and DIFFERENTIATORS].
Value propositions are a great place to start because they communicate how your venture stands out, but the four Ps of marketing help define where and how you can communicate your company's uniqueness.
The 4 Ps of Marketing
When strategizing how and where to market your value prop to potential or existing customers, there are four primary factors to consider.
Product
How is your product relevant to your audience? In other words, how does it solve an existing problem or otherwise add value to their lives? A good example of marketing driven by product quality is Apple’s Shot on iPhone campaign, which used user-generated content to communicate the (albeit controversial) technical superiority of the iPhone 15 Pro camera.
Price
Does the price you’ve set for your product either offer a good deal to the customer and/or actively communicate the value of your brand, and does it generate a profit for your business?
There are several reasons a business chooses the pricing it does, and it all depends on the target audience. For instance, exclusivity is one of the main drivers of demand. So, some brands, like Los Angeles’s premium-priced grocery store Erewhon, feature luxury prices for luxury customers. Compare this to Walmart’s “Always low prices. Always.” messaging from the early aughts, which speaks to a different consumer base seeking affordable groceries, clothes, and household items for their families.
Place
The third P, place, refers to where your product is being sold or marketed. It’s good practice to place your advertisements where your potential customers are. Think about the global sporting event, The Olympics, which will be starting later this summer.
Not only do brands pay top dollar for their marketing to appear on tennis courts and athlete’s uniforms, but they also strike sponsorships and endorsement deals with top players like Lebron James and Simone Biles to further advertise the quality of their products.
Promotion
The final aspect of the 4 Ps of marketing is promotion, which refers to the collective efforts that make up your marketing strategy. The goal of promotion, which takes into account the other 3 Ps, is to effectively communicate, in an attractive and concise way, why customers need your product or service.
It takes into account various marketing channels, such as search ads, app notifications, podcasts, television commercials, websites, and more. Promotion works best if the messages communicated across channels are consistent and foster emotional reactions from audiences.
For example, Nike’s uber-successful yet simplistic Just Do It marketing campaign–which has been active since the late 1980s, by the way–effectively established an emotional connection with athletes and laypersons alike by inspiring them to take action.
Nike’s value proposition, a product that inspires action, adds unquantifiable value to the lives of millions of customers. Also, Just Do It’s simplicity easily cemented the phrase into customers' minds.
To build a solid foundation for your young venture’s marketing efforts, start with these strategies to guide your path forward. Ideally, your business will grow to a point where you can hire marketing professionals to steer your future campaigns for you. Until then, you’ll need to manage your marketing efforts yourself, and the Leadership and Innovation Lab is here to help.
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