Marketing success can be achieved by a strong commitment to the customer’s needs.
Everyone agrees that to succeed you have to get out of your comfort zone. Making new paths requires more effort and risk – so the default is to keep doing the familiar things. Because many non-marketers consider Marketing as an elusive pursuit reserved for the select few “marketing geniuses” – it drives the narrative that proper marketing is “risky and hard” to do. And in this exclusive “club”, only members blessed with this genius can unlock these mysteries and create an effective marketing campaign. So, conveniently they stay in their comfort zone and perpetuate bad marketing.
There are plenty of examples of bad marketing out there. However a lot of it originates from these so called “experts”. I assure you that you dont have to be a “genius” to create and implement an effective marketing plan. You can do it if you are willing to scrap traditional efforts, and start focusing on your customers.
Marketing success it rooted in two basic steps.
- Identify what the customer needs. This is the tough one that many people conveniently skip. It requires them to get out of their comfort zone.
- Plan to efficiently get customers what they need. Marketing efforts usually start and end here – with little to no effort doing the critical work of identifying customer needs.
In a nutshell – that’s it! The secret recipe for marketing genius. Simple – yes. Easy – NO!!!!
Many executives (including marketers) get focused on the activity (the what) and they lose sight of who they are serving. They are not serving a social media platform, an agency, or an email campaign. These activities are just means to an end – and that end should be informing customers that you know what they need – and how what you offer helps them.
[…] With your customers of course! Without knowing the customer needs you’re pretty much shooting in the dark. How could you possibly deliver something of value without knowing what to satisfy? […]