Researching your market

The research side of marketing is understanding who your customer is and how to communicate with them. What is their gender and age? Where are they located? What are their interests? What media do they consume? What will motivate them to buy your product? You need to determine how you're going to reach them with information about your new product in a way that's going to engage them and inspire them to make an inquiry. Importantly, your research should look closely at what your competitors are doing: what their approach is to the market and their ‘value proposition’ for the customer. What channels are they using to reach their customer. How much marketing are they doing and how much are they spending? You need to clearly understand your competitive strengths versus your competitors’ and ensure that point of difference is projected strongly in your marketing material. Understanding in detail where you can bring value to the customer and your competitors can't, and encapsulating that within your marketing material, is essential for success.

Large corporations spend an enormous amount of money on market research, which plays a major role in the overall field of marketing. They will generally engage market research firms to analyse huge amounts of media data and sales data as well as conduct focus groups to assist corporations to understand everything they know — and don't know — about their potential customers, but through very complex statistical analysis of real-life available data.

This information then feeds into their marketing program development from mainstream advertising campaigns in traditional TV, radio and press through to digital advertising and communications via social media platforms and their influencers. They will use the data to identify what keywords to use in websites for search engine optimisation (SEO) and what Adwords (that is, key words you should use in Google ads) to use with search engines to ensure their websites are found when those keywords are typed in. They will know exactly who they are targeting, where and how to reach them, and what inspires their potential customers to take action and enquire to find out more. They will also, as I mentioned earlier, gain a lot of information about their competitors, where they are advertising, who they are advertising to, what their messaging is and how much they are spending.

Testing out your customer

In start-up land I don't expect you to spend millions of dollars on complex market research to understand who your customer is, but you do need to know that you have a customer and validate that they are willing to pay the price for your product. What would trigger an emotive response that would inspire them to make an enquiry?

A good place to start this process is with family and friends. You will certainly have an idea in your mind as to who your customer is, so this process is about validating your thinking, testing the product and the price point, and above all, getting feedback that you can use to fine tune your product and marketing plan. Then keep testing until your audience is satisfied and guarantees they would buy the product at the price you believe it can be delivered. Next, take pre-orders (never waste an opportunity for sales!).

Testing could involve a group of about ten family and friends. Here's how to go about it:

• Ask the right (open-ended) questions to get a detailed response.
• Understand the problems in their lives that the product is solving.
• Find out if the product could help them in other ways that you haven't thought of: is the product going to benefit them the way you really think it is?
• Talk about colours, size, shape, design and functionality. There may be other features or applications you haven't considered.
• Ask them who, in their opinion, are the potential competitors in the market.

Now these are family and friends, so the next step might be to broaden the test group (known as a focus group in marketing) and get them to suggest other people they know who would be interested, to ensure they are not just being nice to you. People you don't know will be more likely give you honest answers and more detailed feedback. Do the improvement cycle and then call another session — and keep refining. It can be very frustrating work and often it's not what you want to hear, but that's better than losing a lot of money in a failed business attempt.

As well as testing your product concept and price point, and understanding your customers at a deeper level, it's essential to ensure the values of your brand (aligned with your mission and company culture) connect at an emotive level with your customers. After all, it's the emotive level of the brain that will trigger the buying response and the connection to your brand. Your customers need to relate and connect to your journey, your passion and ‘why’ you get out of bed in the morning — that is, the values that your business must be built on, as we discussed in the previous chapter.

It's this fundamental understanding of your customer that will form the building blocks of developing the way you communicate with them. There's a brilliant TED Talk video by marketing guru Simon Sinek that you can look up on ‘Why’ you do what you do, compared to ‘What’ you do and ‘How’ you do it, which clearly demonstrates the emotive triggers of why people connect to your brand and not others. I've put a link to the video on the companion website to the book for easy reference (www.essentialentrepreneur.com).

Once you build a deeper relationship with your test market and begin to understand who your customer is, it's time to ascertain what media they consume, and when, in order for the marketing you develop to reach them at the right time, in the right place, maximising the impact of your spend. Traditional media in TV, radio or the press can be expensive so you don't want to use a trial-and-error process to see what works. Digital media, including social media and influencers, is generally more cost effective, but again you must have that cut-through emotional connection as it's a very congested space, and you must know what platforms to use and when to reach your customer to minimise your spend and maximise your impact.

Designing a campaign

The next step is to design a campaign to attract your first customers. As I've already mentioned, I always engage a commercial graphic designer with a marketing background to design the content for my marketing campaign so that it looks professional and consistent with my branding and positioning in the market. People don't know if you're a start-up or an early stage business and you want to gain trust immediately, so credibility and looking professional is essential (this must apply to everything to do with your business). The number of companies around with poor-quality, amateur-looking marketing material and presentations continually astounds me — they're setting themselves up for failure. You've come this far so let's get the execution right.

If you want sales, you'll need a ‘call to action’ to ensure you get a response that drives potential customers to your website, or to pick up the phone and call. Then you need to convert that inquiry into a sale. You may have to set the scene in your marketing to educate your customer in the value of your product to create that all-important emotive response, so draw on the lessons you learned from your focus group testing to ensure each piece of your campaign is producing the right response.

Once you've designed your marketing material and you know where your customers are, what media they are consuming and when, you can purchase advertising space directly from the media source in most cases. The other alternative is to talk to an advertising agency, which is also an option for building your campaign if you have more money to spend. Advertising agencies have media buyers and data to show exactly where your customers are, and part of their business is buying blocks of targeted advertising space at significantly cheaper prices — however, this is usually for a sizeable campaign and spend. What's more, they can tell you what your competitors are doing and what they're spending — which is handy if you want a comparison.

The marketing cycle

Marketing your product involves a full cycle, beginning with market research, product development, marketing, sales, product feedback, product improvements or updates (product cycles) and even product range extensions right through to re-launching and marketing new features. A product's life can be relatively short if it's following a short-term trend (remember those fidget spinners a few years back?) so you want to maximise your immediate impact and sales. Alternatively, it could have a much longer life with a slower build, meaning the entire cycle, including enhancements, becomes much longer. Product improvements or updates must be tested as well and should be based on feedback from your customers (again not just what you think) so that you know it will appeal to your broader market and attract more customers.

Engaging some PR help

Another form of marketing that I find particularly useful when building a public profile for my businesses and taking consumers on my personal journey is public relations (PR). This entails engaging journalists directly from the media or blogs to write or produce stories on you, your company or both. Or you might be called on for comment as the industry expert for a topical story on whatever industry sector you're in.

It's hard to do this directly as it's unlikely you have personal relationships with many journalists. That's where PR companies come in. Working with a PR company can be a cost-effective way to have credible stories written about you and your success, which is a better option than doing your own marketing where you talk about yourself and your products.

PR companies work closely with journalists right across the media spectrum. They will write topical stories about you and/or your company and products and feed these to targeted journalists at the appropriate time so they have the best chance of being published. They will also continually be in contact with journalists and listen out for stories that you or your company could be featured in or that you could comment on. Usually, when anything came up in the news about renewable energy or home energy, I'd be called up by the PR company and they would organise for the journalist to call me directly for comment.

If something ever goes wrong with your business, PR companies can also be engaged for ‘damage control’. They can manage the media and attempt to limit the damage to your business, yourself and your family by communicating on your behalf or prompting you with the right words to say at a media conference to diffuse a situation.

People occasionally tell me they like to fly under the radar, but if you continually operate under the radar you'll probably fall off the radar scope one day. It's always important to talk about your successes, but most importantly it's better to have someone else with credibility talk about your successes publicly.

Marketing can be a lot of fun and really engages the creative side of your thinking and personality, but where possible draw on some expert support in both the research and design sides and remember to present your business professionally. That first impact and impression is the key to success.