Compass Point Bulletin: The First Steps in Marketing

The First Steps. In Marketing

Creating a marketing campaign can be daunting. Most of your focus is on your advertising and what your website will look like. These are important facets—you want to create a brand. But how do you know how to design your promotions if you are unclear on your target audience?

The first step before looking at price, product, place and promotion is to do some marketing research. You need to collect information to see how and what you should offer, along with knowing how much to charge and where to have your business.

There are some great online tools that can be used. Most social media products, like Facebook have surveying tools. When you can connect personally to people to survey this is primary research.

However, sometimes you are not going to get enough information. For example, you may want to know about the income level in the area where you want to place your business. You may also want to know how many businesses similar to yours are in an area. This is important in regards to saturation of a market. Where are you going to get this information?

First, I recommend utilizing the information at census.gov. It is free and will tell you how many people live in the area, plus their median income. This will let you know if people can afford your services in the area. Secondly, use google.com to research other similar businesses. Google will even place them on a map so you can see where your competition is and if you should move to that area.

With this first step completed you can now make business decisions with a knowledge base and familiarity with your market.