This basic marketing guide is intended for people with no formal knowledge of marketing who want to understand the fundamentals of marketing for a small business. This guide won’t teach you everything you need to know, but it will establish enough of a foundation for you to make some useful improvements in your business and pursue a deeper study of marketing.

Marketing is the planning and activities necessary to identify, create, and maintain mutually valuable relationships with your customers. Using marketing techniques, you will figure out who your customers are, what they want, and what needs they have that you can satisfy in exchange for their money.

Marketing is concerned with all aspects of a business that customers can observe. Customers obviously can see your product, can know the prices you charge, and can watch or listen to your advertising, but marketing also deals with product service, product distribution, the sales process, customer service, and anything else that customers can see, hear, touch, or otherwise know about. This broad scope makes a full study of marketing very complex, but fortunately there are a few ideas and activities that small business owners can focus on to improve their businesses quickly, without months of study. The last century of marketing has uncovered some basics that work very well, and this guide will present those basics in a simple form that is directly applicable to small business owners, with an emphasis on independent retailers.

Throughout this guide we will emphasize some critical core principles: (1) all business relationships are human relationships, (2) customers prefer to buy from people they like, and (3) they buy because they want something of value. Marketing is not about manipulating people, but rather about understanding them and giving them what they need or desire. As a result, traditional marketing techniques involve a lot of study and research to figure out what people really want. At a simpler level, however, your customers want many of the same things you want, like love, trust, comfort, good health, and more free time. Marketing processes will help you understand how to grow your business by satisfying these basic human needs.

Overview

In the following chapters we will discuss the basic ideas behind marketing and then talk about the “Customer Life Cycle,” the way that people become long-term customers. The chapters highlight some of the most important ideas in marketing, including the marketing mix, positioning, and the Acquire-Convert-Retain phases of developing customer relationships.

Part 1 covers the basic ideas of marketing and explains how to assess your business and customers to apply those ideas:

• Marketing Mix: The “4 P” description of marketing.
• Positioning: How people think about your business.
• Competition: Competitive advantage, differentiation and the Unique Selling Proposition.
• Research: Knowing your customer.

In Part 2, the guide presents the three phases of developing long-term customers:

• Attracting: Getting people into your store.
• Conversion: Convincing people to make a purchase.
• Retention: Maintaining a relationship with existing customers.

In Part Three, the guide offers specific tactics for each of the major concepts, with many references to other books and websites.

Before we get into the meat of the guide, we should mention a core principle. The most important rule about marketing and possibly all of business is:

It Isn’t About You.

Although they may be friendly, caring, decent people, your customers don’t really care about your profit margins, your struggles with advertising, or how much you like the merchandise in the store. Like everyone else, your customers care about themselves and their families. Your business is really about them.

Business owners must be completely focused on the customer because the customer ultimately determines if a business succeeds or fails. Marketing first allows business owners to understand what customers want, then helps the business to profitably satisfy those desires. With that focus on the customer in mind, let’s start with the basics of marketing.