You don’t do marketing because you want to.  You do it because you want to grow.  Marketing is a grudge. The goal is to grow. Businesses postpone a serious investment in marketing until they can no longer grow or find that they have run out of options. It becomes a case of “What do we do now”? And the answer is, unfortunately, “marketing”.  But here’s the good news… I firmly believe marketing, more than any other business function, should make an impact.  Finance doesn’t make an impact—they just ensure you follow the rules. HR (or whatever it’s called these days) makes no impact. They simply keep the dam wall from bursting.  Sales don’t make an impact (I said that); they harvest what’s available—picking the low-hanging fruit.  Manufacturing just makes stuff. Fill orders. IT maintains your firewall and prevents you from experimenting with cloud solutions. There’s only one function that makes an impact or that can make a real one —marketing. Marketing must make an impact.  It must b

For your marketing to be effective, it requires both a target market and a target product (or service) - a single offering that gives you the highest chance of becoming part of the customer's life. Target market  - that one group of customers within the broader market where you have the greatest chance of success. Target product - that one offering amongst everything you sell that gives you the best chance of an initial sale. Once you've made the initial sale, you are in bed with the customer and the game changes. Achieving this initial sale requires focusing on who you want to sell to and  what you want to sell to them. Target market and target offering.  Do [you]...want [this]... I keep coming back to the 4P's of marketing: Product. Place. Price. Promotion. It is easy to get stuck on the promotion "P". Yet, the other, less obvious Ps have the bigger impact on driving business growth, starting with the product. Just think how McDonald's does it - th

The biggest challenge for small/medium companies is reaching their intended audience. This problem becomes even more pronounced in business markets where key decision-makers often hide behind an email firewall and a receptionist. "Reach" is the crucial reason SMEs do marketing: "help me announce myself to my target market".  Interestingly, with established brands and larger companies, the reason for doing marketing is different. Awareness has already been achieved, and it becomes a case of encouraging existing customers to remain loyal. It is this reason why a company like Coca-Cola continues to advertise. Small brands advertise to become known; large brands stay relevant. Same activity; different objectives. The problem smaller companies have is how to achieve reach with limited resources. Small budgets mean that certain heavy-hitting, mass-marketing tools are unavailable, and so too highly targeted ones that require a substantial investment in upfront research. Ev

It is common for business owners to ask a marketing agency to come up with a proposal on what to do. However, the result is almost always an outright disappointment or an eventual failure. The job of setting a company's marketing strategy should never be completely outsourced. At Firejuice , we prefer to support our clients so they can determined themselves - at a broad level - how they want to do marketing before involving an agency to execute it.  If your marketing agency drives your marketing strategy, then that strategy will primarily benefit the agency, not your business. This is why it's so critical for a business to figure out what it wants to do before asking an outside party to tell them how.   A good marketing strategy answers the following three questions: What is our business objective in doing marketing? What are the two or three key initiatives we will pursue to achieve the objective? What activities will we invest in to support each initiative?   It's only at