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 say stuff like ‘marketing doesn't work for us.’

Often it’s 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 would care.

This guide is about getting the foundation right.

The Basics - 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 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 companies 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 lives, problems and desires. The moment you start seeing your brand through their eyes rather than your own, you're on the right track.

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

The Market Stall is the best way to understand marketing

…it‘s where it all began. 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 underpins everything - 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 (their history, strengths and weaknesses). We just give it a more formal name.

Competitive Positioning - the foundation

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

You'll know a USP (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 others don't. Isn't that great". It can get too literal and inward-facing - when purchase decisions require a behavioural change - they're heavily influenced 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 our strengths and weaknesses, where is the space we can create in our audience's minds that's ours to own.

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

Your CP is cultural - 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'da thunk you could make a flipping vacuum cleaner into a designer, must-have), Red Bull, Apple, Coca Cola… 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 really knowing your audience is so important.

Your CP should be based on something that's:
- True (to you)
- Relevant (to your audience)
- Distinctive (in the market).

Is there a cultural trend that you can tap into? A competitor’s weakness you can exploit? Do you have unique insight about your audience that others don't?

Vital though your CP is, it's just the foundation, there's a long way to go after that - you still need to sell it to your audience: messaging, advertising, content and design to bring it all to life.

Remember the rule: Don't touch tactics - ads, social, branding, website, identity - until your Competitive Positioning is nailed.

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, and 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.

Our insight was that 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 a repositioning, not just from a redesign.

The competitive positioning that followed was:
Peripherals designed by experts, backed by a name you already trust - for gamers who value a quality setup.

(A Competitive Positioning contains both 'the hook' in your offering and your target audience and their mindset.)

Next, we suggested 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. 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.

The huge lesson here is that the products were exactly the same, but the perception of the products was different - that's the power of positioning.

World Building - selling the dream

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/ /intrigues/informs.

When it's working, people don't just buy from you - they have a relationship with you. That's when you create loyal customers… the best of whom become advocates, people who recommend your brand to others. They're priceless.

What next?

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. You can do this internally, but we've found it usually helps to get an independent eye, it's much harder to do from the inside. If you are interested in doing it yourself - this book, by the grand-daddies of positioning, is a classic and a great intro: Positioning The Battle For Your Mind - Ries & Trout.

Once you know exactly what space you're claiming and why - everything that follows will have a focus and a far better chance of attracting the right people and convincing them.

If you're not sure your 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?