How to get started in marketing... without wasting time and money

Many businesses blow their first marketing budget and some keep doing it. Some even come to the conclusion that "marketing doesn't work for my company." Not because they made bad decisions, but because they started in the wrong place - jumping straight to ads, content etc before they'd worked out what they were actually trying to say, to whom, and why anyone should give a monkey's.

This guide is about getting the foundation right first. Everything else, the ads, the social, the website, the branding, all the flashy stuff… comes afterwards.

What's Marketing?

Marketing is a catch-all term for a huge range of disciplines: strategy, planning, advertising, design, content, social media, influencer, PR and more. It can feel overwhelming from the outside and it can easily get complicated on the inside.

It probably has more jargon-speak than any other sector. But strip it back and it's really one thing: making sure you get noticed and chosen by anyone who has the problem or desire that your product or service fulfils.

That's it.

The mindset shift that you absolutely have to make

The hardest thing about marketing, especially for founders who care deeply about what they've built, is learning to look at their company from the outside… not sometimes - always.

Your audience doesn't care about your company the way you do. They care about their own problems and desires. The moment you start seeing your brand through their eyes rather than your own, you're on the track to making everything clearer and simpler.

Even big companies can lose touch with this. But market stall holders never do...

The Market Stall is the simplest way to understand Marketing

A market trader is in direct, face-to-face contact with their audience every day. They learn fast what gets people to stop at their stall, what makes them pick something up, what triggers them to buy - and what the person on the next stall is doing differently. They have to learn fast to survive.

That foundational knowledge - know your audience, know what you have that they want (or what you can convince them they want), know how to pitch it so they pay attention, and know your competition - underpins everything. We just give it a more formal name.

Competitive Positioning — the foundation

The information from market stall example forms the basis of something called a Competitive Positioning - this is a strategy to differentiate you from your competition.

We all know what USP is - a Unique Selling Point. A Competitive Positioning takes that idea further. The danger with a USP is that companies can still end up too focused on themselves: "here's what we do/have that other's don't. Aren't we great". It can get too literal and inward-facing - when purchase decisions are heavily driven by emotional and cultural forces.

A Competitive Positioning (CP) forces a broader, more audience-focused question: given everything our competitors are saying and doing, and bearing in my our strengths and weaknesses, where is the space we can make in our audience's minds that's ours to own. That last part is really important, we're not trying to pitch a tent, we're trying to build a fortress in their hearts and minds.

Get this right and every subsequent decision becomes easier. Get it wrong and you can spend a lot of money going in the wrong direction, very confidently.

For the audience to care your CP must to fit with a need they have - often a need you that they didn't know they had until they encountered your offering.

Your CP has a strong cultural component - a key factor in many purchase decisions is ‘what does choosing this brand say about who I am?’ We see that with brands from all sectors, the usual examples are: Nike, Dyson (who'd a thunk you could make a flipping vacuum cleaner into a designer, must-have), Red Bull, Apple… there's a cultural kudos to choosing them. Of course, people are members of different cultural groups, so one person's kudos can be another's turn-off, this is why knowing your audience is so important.

Beware the huge industry in writing books about successful brands and analysing why they're successful - there are plenty of other brands that had great marketing and failed - it's not all about the marketing - the products/services have to deliver too. And a slice or two of luck doesn't hurt either.

But!! Your CP is the foundation, there's a long way to go after that - you still need: stand out products, advertising/creative, content and design to bring it all to life.

The big rule is, don't touch tactics - ads, social, branding, website, identity - until this positioning is nailed. It's a total waste of time and money doing any of that work until you know exactly what you're saying, why you’re saying it and to whom.

What good positioning looks like in practice

Here's an example drawn from our 100,000 Hours of experience…

GAME, had over 400 stores across the UK and Europe, were the undisputed leaders of video game retail. But their own-brand peripheral range of controllers, headsets, accessories etc - wasn't selling. They'd correctly identified that the packaging design was sub-par. But there was a deeper issue underneath.

Customers didn't believe GAME knew how to manufacture peripherals. Why would they? GAME was a retailer. Even sitting on shelves alongside third-party brands that GAME themselves stocked, the own-brand products felt less credible - and credibility is everything when a customer is choosing between options at similar price points.

The solution was simple, and it came from positioning rather than simply design. We recommended creating a sub-brand called GAMEware - giving the peripheral range its own identity that implied specialist expertise, while still sitting under the GAME umbrella and benefiting from its scale and trust.

Then we redesigned the packaging. Beautiful, clean, confident, credible.

Sales increased by 60% over three months. No additional marketing spend - just a packaging reprint and some POS (Point Of Sale - in-store posters, shelf strips etc).

That's what solving the right problem looks like. The packaging had been the symptom. The positioning was the cure.

World Building - Convincing Your Audience

We think about marketing - positioning, branding, content, creative - as World Building just like our favourite TV shows and computer games - Game of Thrones, Fallout, Breaking Bad, and quite literally MineCraft…

You have to be inspiring and convincing. Everything your company stands for, says and does should feel like it belongs to the same place. A pocket-realm that's built in your audience's mind and consistently entertains and/or informs.

When it's working, people don't just buy from you. They feel like they know you. That's the difference between a transaction and a relationship - and it's the difference between customers who shop around and customers who don't.

Where to go from here

If you're starting from scratch or questioning whether your current marketing is built on solid foundations, the place to begin is always the same: your Competitive Positioning. Not your logo, not your ads, not your social strategy.

Once you know exactly what space you're claiming and why - everything else follows - and it follows much more easily than you'd think.

If you're not sure you marketing is a true reflection of the strengths of your business and would like to work through your positioning with people who've done it at every scale - from challengers to category leaders… Why not email us and we'll arrange a chat?