I want to learn marketing is your mission – and you need to be at the front of the line, armed with all the techniques your competitors have yet to learn. In this article, I will answer some of the questions that are often overlooked.

Learning up-to-date marketing techniques is obviously vital if you want to upgrade your resume/CV to become a more valuable employee.

If you’re starting a new business, or you’re already running one, keeping your nose in front of the competition could mean the difference between success and failure.

Marketing systems and marketing methods are constantly evolving… so it’s important to keep your marketing skills up to date – (some great news about that at the end of this article).

First, I want to quickly touch on some important marketing principles, which are often overlooked in the rush to get up-skilled with Instagram tricks, Facebook ads, split testing and all the other golden nuggets.

I Want to Learn Marketing
How to Build Your Money Tree

It’s an unarguable point that no business can be successful without effective marketing or a large sprinkling of angel dust. If you have access to angel dust, you can stop reading now, but if not…

It’s staggering just how many new businesses (and plenty of established ones) set off down the road with finely tuned development plans for their products or services, but no carefully thought out marketing strategies on how to get their offerings in front of prospective customers with cash in their pockets and an appetite to buy.

It’s all very well having an aggressive sales team, but your marketing efforts are what draws potential customers towards you, softens them up, and makes them willing to listen. It’s like building a money tree. Get it right, and everything flourishes. If you don’t understand the psychology of marketing, then selling is like pushing a rock up a hill.

I Want to Learn Marketing
Wading through the Waffle

Having been successfully involved in marketing for many years now, I think back to my early days and realize how much time and wasted effort I could have saved, if I’d understood the basics.

There’s a lot of waffle spoken about getting traffic to your website, but focusing on numbers of visitors isn’t particularly helpful. What is more important, is identifying exactly which groups of people are most likely to be interested in your products or services, and then discover everything about them.

It’s no secret, that the Internet is an enormous entity. Simply designing and publishing an attractive website is only a very small part of your marketing strategy. No matter how beautifully designed it may be, if the right people never see it, your website will be of scant benefit to your business.

There’s a whole science attached to getting interested eyeballs onto your website. It’s not that difficult when you learn how. And to prove my point – you didn’t stumble across this article by chance… I carefully planned that you would find it… Spooky huh?

At some point, you may be using the many paid marketing tools, like pay per click (PPC) on social media. Knowing exactly who you want to attract, will allow you to tweak the advertising controls to eliminate unnecessary expensive clicks from people who are curious, but have zero interest to buy.

I Want to Learn Marketing
Some People Just Don’t Care

50% of all marketing and advertising costs are wasted, attracting people who aren’t remotely interested. Anything you can do to cut out time wasters and tire kickers will keep your hard earned cash in your pocket where it belongs – and of course, claw back loads of your valuable time that would be lost on chasing mirages.

Knowing the demographics of your target market is the number one important task to get to grips with. If you have a clear idea of their age group, where they live, what they read, how they spend their working lives, as well as their down time – their hobbies, interests and dislikes, where they shop, and any relevant information you can gather, you will have assembled a clear target for some effective marketing.

Is Your Offer Right for the Market?

What’s the story about the product or service you’re offering? Is it something that people want? Is there already an existing market for similar offerings?

If you have to convince people they need your product, you have created a problem for yourself. If you’re offering cheap flights, toothpaste or food, it’s good news… there’s a healthy demand for these items already. All you have to do now is connect with people who fly, clean their teeth and like to eat good food regularly.

If you’ve invented a new gadget or gizmo, you may feel certain there’s a market for it, but first you’ll need to convince everyone else they need it, and unless you save people money, or time, or make them feel better about themselves, you will meet plenty of resistance, making it a really tough sell.

Finding an identifiable niche for your product or service is going to help tremendously. If you’re marketing toothpaste, there’s already an abundance of tooth cleaning products already on people’s bathroom shelves. How are you going to persuade them to stop using their regular brand and switch to yours?

The answer is, you have to create a new category that is different, or even slightly different, to existing offerings already on the market.

There are many brands of toothpaste, which claimed to clean teeth brilliant white and protect against a variety of unpleasant dental situations. So you’re going to have to come up with something unique.

It might be that your toothpaste is the cheapest. It could be yours is the most expensive and targeted at the luxury end of the market. Your toothpaste might be an unusual colour, or tastes of herbs, or come in a range of colours to suit different family members… (Okay – it’s true – I’ve never made toothpaste, as you’ve probably realised) but you get the idea – whatever you come up with, your product or service will need to be identifiably different from all the other offerings on the market to induce people to pick yours off the shelf, next time they are in the supermarket or pharmacy.

This requirement to be different is usually referred to as a unique selling proposition (USP).

Marketing Is an Emotional Business

An important point to remember is that people buy on emotion, and it could be expensive to overlook this.

So much advertising is wasted trying to tell people about technical details, or boring them stiff with corporate claptrap.

Nobody sets out to buy a drill. What they really want, is holes in the wall. So boring people to death with technical features, is not the way forward. Tell your potential customer how easy it is to use, and how quickly and conveniently it drills holes in the wall, and you may have a sale.

Depending on how you present your products and services to your potential customers, this will influence their emotions and affect their desire to purchase – or not.

If you ask people to tell you which is their dream car, they might mention sporty vehicles like Ferrari, Lamborghini or McLaren. They might choose large family cars, with heaps of room and plenty of storage, or an off road vehicle with loads of grunt and four-wheel-drive.

Your job as a marketeer, is to know your demographics and make the products and services you’re offering attractive and life enhancing for whichever group you’re targeting.

All the Tools and Tricks You Need

When you’ve clearly established the demographics of your target market, and you have a firm grasp of the psychology needed for successful promotions, you will need to learn how to use the many clever tools that will enable you to capture the focused attention of the people most likely to buy from you.

On that point, here’s some good news – Fortunately, lots of the very best marketing training and marketing strategies and methods are now online, and easily available at the click of your mouse.

Udemy is a convenient and accessible platform containing a wide range of marketing video courses giving you lifetime access. Courses are offered to you at very affordable prices, when compared with the inconvenience and money costs of attending live college classes.

One of the attractive advantages of online tuition is that you can learn your marketing skills while travelling on public transport, or while relaxing at the weekend, or pretty much any time that suits you.

You don’t have to attend college and dovetail with a tutor’s timetable you may find inconvenient. And you can watch your chosen trainings over and over, if you need to reinforce all or part of the course. Furthermore, you can dip back into the training again at any time in the future, as you will have lifetime access.

Over the coming months, we’ll be examining individual courses more closely. In the meantime we wish you well and feel sure you’ll experience an upsurge in your understanding and your career.

You arrived at this article saying – I want to learn marketing – and I hope I have pointed you in the right direction.

Go to the Udemy website to check
out all the online marketing courses
that will help increase your earning power
CLICVK HERE > > > I Want to Learn Marketing

 

Good luck, and here’s to your success…pop

 

Simon Bailey – Independent Marketing Engineer