To most business owners marketing is just about running promotions. They generally spend their money on advertising and wonder why they are not growing their business.

Marketing is about making sales superfluous.

The purpose of any and all of your marketing must be to move your prospect closer to buying. Every action you take should be about helping your customers make their final buying decision. 

Essentially make selling superfluous as the customer will sell themselves.

In trying to reach the goal of top mind awareness with their ideal client most marketers carry out the same mistakes by using old product data marketing tactics to sell their products and fail.

If you want to grow your business then sales and marketing need to work together. Your marketing needs to truly focus on the problems and issues of your clients. 

You need to understand what troubles them, what frustrations they have and how you help them solve these issues. If you don’t understand them how can you help them?

If you want to build a business that is a marketing machine then these 7 laws are crucial to your success.

1) Product/Market Fit

Everyone has problems. Everyone is trying to improve their lives.

A problem is something that is in need of an improvement. Your business is about creating solutions to solve the problems for your ideal clients. 

Create a solution that actually solves the problem once and for all.

Every problem has numerous possible solutions. The key to success is about how you solve your problems.

For your marketing to be successful you need to make sure you are targeting your ideal client. That your product or service is what they are looking for and will solve their most pressing issues. 

Before you begin any marketing or sales activity you need to be clear about the following:

1. Message: what is your message, what problems do you solve

2. Market: who are you solving these problems for, who is your ideal client.

3. Medium : where is your market hanging out, how can you attract their attention.

Customers will only spend money on things they perceive to have as much or more value then the money they are spending. So you need to communicate how your product and service will provide this value.

Southwest airlines have built their business on low fares and low cost. Their solution is to provide a low cost flight to customers. You understand this through all the marketing activity of the airline.

Solution = Strategy

Their solution is their strategy. They then go about executing their strategy. They don’t try to be anything that they are not or communicate something that they are not.

You should not select strategies you cannot execute.

Match your skills and capabilities with the strategy that you can execute. Do not pick a strategy that is above your skills and capabilities. 

2) Utilizing ROI-Driven Metrics

Bottom line, what gets measured, gets monitored. 

It is  worth having in mind that measuring too many metrics can be very counterproductive thus meaning, focusing on a few key metrics is key to marketing success.

Many marketers sin by measuring every metric they have access to, rather than focusing on a few core metrics. 

Similar to the “Pareto Principle” less than 20% of your metrics account for more than 80% of your results, thereby establishing a clear focus on a handful of metrics is the most important factor in marketing analytics & insights.

The first step in making the shift towards becoming a marketing strategist is to analyze your current marketing funnel thoroughly by asking yourself the following questions:

• What are the steps my customers go through in order to convert?

• Where am I currently struggling the most?

• How can I improve each step?

Next, make a list of all the metrics you want to measure and ask yourself: “What decision would I make differently after I’d get this number?” 

If you find it hard to come up with a clear cut answer, remove it from your list.

The most important thing to discern from the new age of marketing is that in the past marketing was a lot similar to what you’d see in “Mad Men” by making stylish creative ads for newspapers and magazines with no real data to back it up.

Data is your greatest ally today. You have access to amazing data that is available nearly instantaneously. You can quickly learn how your prospects and clients respond to any marketing activity. 

You can make better informed decisions much quicker. 

3) Behavior-Based Marketing

The common misconception of most marketers is to assume they understand everything about their customers. The truth of the matter is, many probably do — to a certain degree. 

The best rule of thumb for us marketers is to acknowledge the fact that you’ll never know your customers better than they know themselves.

In our times, where big data analytics is increasingly playing a bigger role in our lives, there’s no reason whatsoever to try and guess how your customers will behave. 

At your disposal are tools like Google Trends and Social Mention to assist you in making intelligent, data driven decisions pertaining how your customers are behaving as opposed to how you think they’ll behave.

In addition, a data driven approach to marketing will often uncover new opportunities. By analyzing this data, you’d be able to establish actionable plans that impact pricing, features, sales, and customer service.

4) Create an Optimized Customer Experience for Every Type of Offering

Increasing online lead conventions can’t be achieved by using a “one size fits all” approach to customer experience.

Thus meaning, your offerings should be fully optimized to match your client’s buying criteria in order for you to maximize your marketing ROI. 

This is virtually impossible to achieve by referring all of your traffic to the same homepage that will not, no matter what, match the desired customer experience of every single one of your offerings.

The Good Old Tactician Tactics

What Top Strategic Marketers Do

By segmenting your audience with these offers you then can be more personalized with your offerings. You are more aware of the needs of your clients and so provide more products or offerings to suit your clients.

Using direct response advertising will allow you to target the different market segments with more personalized messages and increase the performance of your business.

The good thing is that you will then be able to learn more from your actual results and the data that you are collecting.  

5) Implement Marketing Automation

Marketing automation is all about your business being more responsive to the needs and actions of your prospects and clients.

Technology will allow you to do more with less effort, overcome human frailties and respond to the actions of your customers and prospects.

To benefit from marketing automation it is important to cover these 4 steps:

1. Define Your Goals

Know where you are going and what you want to achieve. Do you want to iIncrease leads or generate more repeat business

2. Identify Who To Target

What parts of your sales funnel need improvement. Do you need to generate more leads or converting more leads

3. Map User Flows

Mapping user flow is a way to visualize the steps people need to go through to be able to take the action you desire

4. Segment and Score Your Leads

Rating your leads helps you figure out exactly who needs further nurturing and who is ready close to a sale.

Marketing automation will deliver these benefits to your business:

• Drive More Leads
• Convert More Leads to Sales
• Optimise Marketing Spend
• Grow Your Business
• Improve Value to Customers
• Personalise Communication with Customers
• Adapt to Changing Needs of Customers

6) Use Market Data vs. Product Data

Studies have shown that when trying to market a product for consumers, product data was found to be a lot less motivational than market data simply because consumers are a lot more motivated to buy a vision of what they’ll become vs. a list of benefits.

Let’s look at a few examples:

Example: If you were trying to sell you a treadmill by telling you that it’s the best treadmill money can buy, it will last you more than 20 years, and you won’t ever regret buying it! 

By contrast, stating something like:

“Did you know that by implementing one simple habit to your lifestyle you can decrease your chances of suffering from one of the following illnesses (heart attack, high blood pressure, high cholesterol etc… by more than 50%?! Find out how by clicking”

Then, in the next page show you medical research on the benefits of exercising to decrease your chances of suffering from these illnesses, and finally after you scroll down a little bit offer you a limited time offer of 40% discount on a brand new treadmill, do you think by now you’d be more motivated to buy?

Here are some other examples:

Thirty-three thousand new products are launched every year, at a cost of billions of dollars. Yet, as many as 75% of them fail. Why? Most marketers don’t know what customers want.

At least 1,484 CEOs left their jobs in 2008 – the equivalent of six every working day. Why? Because they didn’t have the knowledge and insights about customers, economic trends, and technologies that would have saved their companies – and their jobs.

Using market data is way more powerful then product data and opens up so many opportunities for your business.

Your marketing will be based on educating your customers and prospects and as such you will be seen as an authority within your niche and with your customers.

7) Test, Learn and Implement

Always be testing.

When you are testing you are looking to improve and grow your business. You are looking for feedback from your customers on what appeals to them.

Never ever think you know it all and that you are the expert. At the end of the day you answer to your market and the customers. 

Feedback is extremely important if you are looking to improve and grow your business.

If you ever spend time reading and listening to some of the world’s leading financial investors they all say they don’t know what is going to happen in the market. BUT they all rely upon data and feedback to make their decisions.

The same applies to you and your business. Look at your data, run tests and act on the feedback.

A system of continuous improvement will do so much for your business.

Your marketing is a system. 

If you begin to view your business as a series of systems you will be able to turn your business into a profit juggernaut.

With any system your inputs will affect your outputs. So if you want to change your outputs you need to change your inputs.

These 7 laws will help you turn your marketing into a well oiled machine.