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Effective Marketing Approaches and Their Impact on the Accomplishment of Business Objectives

Brian Kazungu

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Brian Kazungu, 13/05/2023

When we are talking about marketing, there are three interconnected words or issues that must be discussed in order for us to clearly understand this important business function.

Marketing – Selling – Sale.

Basically put, marketing means engaging in activities that makes your products and services appealing to your targeted clients.

Having looked at Marketing, let us now focus on the following terms: 1) Selling 2) Sale

Selling – offering or presenting products and services to clients so that they can buy at their convenience.

Sale – the actual exchange that happens between the buyer (customer) and the seller after meeting the conditions of a transaction.

As a component of marketing, we also have the field of advertising which means: to appealingly and accurately present a product or information about a product to your targeted clients in way that enables the selling process to achieve an intended sale.

Advertising can also be described as an appealing generic public display or customised private presentation of data about a product or service to a targeted audience in a way that arouses interest in order to create, maintain and promote a mutually beneficial transactional engagement.

We are looking at marketing because, generally, individuals and corporates engage in business in order to offer products and services to others in a way that enables and guarantees attainment or achievement of business targets at a profit.

As such, the failure to effectively market your products can thus interfere with profitability and hampers the attainment of your set goals.

Marketing on its own is an art that must be mastered, it’s a skill that must be learnt and it’s a profession that must be respected because it is an activity that makes sure that all the other aspects of business continues to operate fluently especially for mutual good.

In order to make the field of marketing clear, simple and easy, we must align it with the Mission Statement of your enterprise.

The main reason for such an alignment is that a Mission Statement helps you to run your business professionally and efficiently since it summaries your whole business and gives you a solid and clear picture that must guide you in your commercial activities.

More-so, a Mission Statement gives your company an identity and defines what your business is all about and what it is going to be in the future.

It is like a blueprint (map) of where the company is going and how it is going there.

The same Mission Statement defines who you want to be and highlights the unique products and services that you are going to offer and how you are going to achieve that.

You should not have a problem with coming up with your company’s Mission Statement because even as an individual you can have your personal Mission Statement in life.

I am going to demonstrate how to design or craft a Mission Statement so that it becomes easier for you to come up with one on your own especially towards helping you in designing effective marketing approaches.

Your Mission Statement should clearly show us three basic components namely:

  1. Your target market.
  2. The product or service that you are going to offer.
  3. A unique way of presenting your product or service to your target market.

Let us say that our company is called SME Consultancy and it specialises in offering training material for small to medium enterprises.

Our Mission Statement would thus look as follows:

Mission Statement for SME Consultancy:

To provide effective and practical training material to the global small-to-medium enterprise community in a customised, easily understandable and practically usable format.

In this case the target market is the global SME community, the product or service is effective and practical training material while the unique way of doing it is to provide it in a customised, easily understandable and usable format.

On the other hand, my Mission Statement as Brian Kazungu is to provide management advisory services to entrepreneurs across the world through identifying, solving and eliminating administrative incapacities across the business sector.

In this regard my target audience becomes entrepreneurs all over the world, my product is management advisory services and I am going to do that by identifying, solving and eliminating administrative incapacities in the businesses that I engage with.

I believe that these examples have helped you to clearly understand the relevance of a Mission Statements in relation to the field of marketing, and I believe that you can now find it easy for you to come up with one for your own company.

We have highlighted that a Mission Statement is made up of three components which are:

  1. The product/service – what is it that you want to offer?
  2. The targeted market – who do you want to offer this product to?
  3. The unique approach – how do you intend to effectively and profitably engage the market with your product?

Based on the above explanation, you can now see that a Mission Statement determines the marketing and selling techniques that must be employed towards achieving a sale.

You must also understand that market identification should precede product formulation and in between these two comes the approach that must be adopted for effective engagement.

Let me help you to clearly understand the logic behind the importance of designing a product after having identified a market as compared to doing it the other way round.

I am going to present a justification for my point based on the assumption that you want to run a professional, civilized and people centric institution.

The basis for saying that market identification precedes product formulation is based on the understanding that people in any environment are faced with two things namely;

  1. Opportunities
  2. Threats

It is these opportunities and threats that entrepreneurs respond to by crafting products and services that help people to efficiently and effectively react to the prevailing environment.

So basically, effective marketing starts with identifying opportunities and threats that are encountered by people in a given community and then crafting a mechanism (products and services) that enables them to seize these opportunities or to defend against these threats.

This angle helps you to be an effective marketer or salesperson as compared to an angle where you start with product formulation and then market identification.

Unfortunately, some companies correctly engage in business by firstly identifying a market and then designing and offering relevant products but later on end up concentrating more on the product than on the dynamic needs of the market.

Knowing people’s opportunities and threats helps you in coming up with the correct approach since you will be aware of their wishes and concerns in the pursuit of their goals.

This enables you to effectively package your promotional material in a way that quickly captures the attention of the target audience since people are generally emotionally attached to the issues that disturbs them as well as to those that gives them a sense of achievement.

Those issues that disturbs their peace and development are called threats and those issues that promotes their peace and development are called opportunities.

So, on this basis, you can see that marketing calls for you to have an observant mind that recognises various changes in people’s behaviour since it is this behaviour that influences or determines people’s expenditure.

At this point, you have to know that the behaviour which determines expenditure is influenced by what people love or fear relative to prevailing circumstances in their communities.

However, merely identifying opportunities and threats of a given society and then crafting a product in this regard does not automatically guarantee you a sale.

This is because you also need to craft a unique way of interaction and then approach the relevant people with what you have observed (their opportunities and threats) and what you have done about it (the solution).

Let us demonstrate this by giving examples.

If you run a company that offers accounting and company registration services, you need to ask the following questions and then use your answers as a guide in designing your general marketing approach or even in crafting your advertising campaign for that matter.

  1. What is this (Product or Service)?

Company Registration

  • When and why do people need it (Timing and Purpose)?

You always need a formally registered business if you want to professionally transact with those clients who value proper business procedures and this includes individuals, corporates, NGOs and even the government especially when responding to tenders.

N.B: These entities usually engage formally registered businesses for both insurance, auditing, tax, social responsibility and corporate governance purposes.

  • What happens when they do not use this product/service (The Consequence)?

When a client does not use our service, in this case, if the potential customer does not get formally registered, he/she/they may lose out on the possibility of engaging high value clients who have a definite ability to pay and who can also sustainably utilise your products over a long time.

More so, your unregistered (informal) client misses out on eligibility to get loans for expansion and even for order financing. He/she is also likely to miss out on entrepreneurship related government grants and other funding opportunities especially from entrepreneurship centred NGOs and other business investors.

As such, when you approach an inspired and hardworking entrepreneur who is not formally registered, you must be able to enlighten him/her about what he/she is missing out if he/she chooses to continue trading informally.

After that, you must then inform this client that you can offer the service efficiently and affordably at his convenience and more so, you can emphasize that such a move helps them with eligibility for funding, loans and tenders that can help them to grow as a business.

You can actually look for companies that are regularly looking for the services that your potential client offers and then show him/her the requirements or rules of engagement.

When that is done, you can then advise them that once formally registered, they also stand a chance to supply their goods or services to such financially stable and reputable clients who can increase their chances of success and boost their business profile.

In real terms, you must capture the attention of your targeted clients and develop in them an interest to know more about your products and to create in them a burning desire for experiencing the reality of what you said that your product can do.

Adapted from The SME HANDBOOK written by Brian Kazungu

Amazon Book Link: https://amzn.to/3geP4ux

Author Profile: https://www.amazon.com/author/briankazungu

Brian Kazungu is an Author, Poet, Journalist, and Technology Enthusiast whose writing covers issues to do with Business, Travelling, Motivation and Inspiration, Religion, Politics, and Communication among others. https://www.amazon.com/author/briankazungu https://muckrack.com/brian-kazungu http://www.modernghana.com/author/BrianKazungu [email protected] @BKazungu-Twitter He has written and published several books covering various aspects of human life including leadership, entrepreneurship, politics, personal development as well as poetry and travel. These books are found on Amazon https://www.amazon.com/author/briankazungu

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