I have always maintained that marketing is using a lot of basic God given common sense. Unfortunately marketers like to make it an esoteric art. The one reason why Philip Kotler book on marketing is still standard read for many B-school students is the utter clarity and common sensical approach he takes in making marketing look simple, feel simple and actually be simple.

As a marketer and an entrepreneur I often find myself stuck in a particularly awkward situation of not knowing what to do with my marketing situation. At such inflexion points, I always go back to the fundamental 4 P’s of marketing- Product, Place, Price, and Promotion which was originally proposed in 1960’s by E. Jerome McCarthy! And I ask myself

What is reason why my customers will buy my product?

Where will I sell my product?

At what price will I sell my product?

How will I promote my product?

Over the years since I graduated I have played many roles. I have been a door to door salesman, a computer salesman, an advertising executive, a brand marketer and startup entrepreneur to boot. For several years as I worked my way dutifully up the corporate ladder and thanks in no mean measure of having worked in some wonderful organizations, I have had the unique opportunity of having worked in literally every field of marketing be it direct sales, tele-marketing, advertising, market research, direct marketing, digital marketing, content marketing, event management, public relations and below-the-line marketing.

The result of all these varied exposures to marketing was that my love for what ‘good marketing’ could do for brands and businesses grew exponentially. In reality there is no such thing as ‘good marketing’ or ‘bad marketing’. There are only good marketers and bad marketers.

To my mind a good marketer is that person who approaches a problem with an open mind and attempts to solve it with a great deal of common sense marketing approach. Truth be told, marketing is a creative field and requires an ‘out-of-the-box’ solution at times. Bad marketers would like everyone to think otherwise. They will couch the marketing initiative in a veil of complex knowledge shroud partly to hide their own ignorance and partly to boost their own prestige.

I remember an incident that perfectly reflects this. While I was working in marketing with the Indian subsidiary of Philip Morris we had an opportunity to sit through a presentation by a well-known consultant. As young marketers, all of us looked forward to a session where we could learn something. The hall was packed. The presentation lasted a little over an hour and all of us sat in complete silence watching the power packed slides filled with complex diagrams and shout-outs.

After the meeting, a few of us hung around and looked sheepishly at each other. Finally one of the brand managers picked up courage and asked “Did any of you understand anything?”. All of us shook our head except our senior manager who perked up and said wryly “He said that our brand sucked because we were not attracting enough young adult smokers.”. There was a collective “Ahh” in the room as that simple statement conjured up in our young minds the core marketing problem. I have always wondered to this date, why the consultant couldn’t simplify what he wanted to communicate. Of course, truth be told he wouldn’t have been able to charge as much as he did if he were to have walked into the room and told us this.

Marketing is simple. People make it complex. And businesses suffer as a result.

Which is why I began writing on marketing. This book is a collection of various articles that I have published on different occasions. They have a common theme. They talk about various aspects of marketing from a common sense perspective. You won’t find a jargon here that you could use in your next networking meet. Instead you will find insights and actionable points that you can use in your business and be a better marketer.

If you’re a struggling startup entrepreneur, a seasoned business owner running your own company or a budding business graduate, you will find it hopefully useful. There are no secrets in this book that will shock you. You will find instead heaps of basic common sense that I have found and applied successfully with several International brands.

As always, forgive the typos. I am a good marketer, not a very good editor.

Good reading!

Rajesh Menon

Many of us have a dream of turning and becoming a startup entrepreneur. Many of us do in fact become entrepreneurs. We create a great product with a fantastic price point and put it up for sale at a great place and then discover that that we don’t have enough money for the fourth P- Promotion. History is replete with failed brands and products that possibly died due to poor or inadequate marketing.

If wishes were horses, beggars would fly. This sums up the combined wishes of all entrepreneurs when it comes to finding marketing dollars for their business. But marketing much like bootstrapping can be done with limited or relatively no budget for the bootstrapped entrepreneur. All it takes is patience, a lot of hard smart work and a pinch of ‘roll up your sleeve and get to it’ work culture.

Get yourself some Interns

I know many of the readers are going to shout “exploitation” here. But I would ignore them. The fact of the matter is that young grads need experience and there can be no better experience than working in a startup and being mentored and guided by the entrepreneur himself. I always hire fresh interns with no work experience for about 8 weeks and pay them an internship allowance. Young people excite me with their ideas and most often than not I end up learning from them.

Some may call this exploitation of cheap labor, but the reality is that both the intern and the entrepreneur gains immensely in this relationship. For the entrepreneur it’s no doubt cheap hired intelligent labor who will help him drive his vision forward and for the intern it is a work experience he or she will never ever forget.

You could source interns from your local college or community school or even private centers. Often learning institutes farm out interns as part of their curriculum.

Make yourself a marketing plan

The 2nd most important tip and I cannot emphasis enough on how important this! Most entrepreneurs I have met have a rather vague idea of how they would go about marketing themselves. They thrive on the product /service superiority that they have imagined and believe that customers will fight themselves to their doors. Realization dawns when they find themselves down to their last dollar that customers really don’t care all that much. Not unless you have of course sold them the idea of your business.

Therefore making a marketing plan is critical. Remember the golden rule while making the plan- Be objective. Don’t assume that people will love your product or service.

Open your social media account.

No matter what your business or service is, you can’t go wrong with opening up your company pages on Linked in, Facebook, YouTube, G+ and Twitter. You could also consider Pinterest as another option if your core audience are women. Another great social media is Quora which I have found as a great place to get the word around. But the top 5 is a must. You ought not to be doing any new business today if you’re not using social media!

The next step is to prioritize your social media. You will neither have the time nor the energy to do adequate justice to all 5 accounts as a startup entrepreneur. Focus your attention on 2 or 3 to start with, preferably the ones where you believe your customers are. If you’re in B2B markets, the top 3 in order of priority would be LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. The other two are to be used strategically.

Write up your press releases.

Do you think you can write? Great. Start writing up your press releases. If you can’t write, there are a host of sites that will allow you to reach out to professional writers who will churn out your press release complete with backlinks for a penny a word. Literally. Your writer may be located in the Philippines or possibly in India. But who cares? We live in a flat world.

While writing your press release bear in mind that every reporter, every editor, every publisher gets thousands of press releases every day from hopefuls such as you. You therefore need to make sure that there are enough ‘media hooks’ or ‘story pegs’ that reporters or editors could use to write you up in their publication. Think over your business, your life, your family background, your co-founder, your community, your industry and put together as many story pegs as you can have and weave your press releases around them.

Factor in about 7-8 press releases that you can use over a period of time, each with a different story peg. You could also get quoted by reporters looking for a good quote. I personally use a site called Helpareporter.com that sends me daily reporter requests from around the world.

Get yourself some Free PR

There are umpteen sites on the net that offer free press releases. Take them. A simple google search should throw up several. My first press release I sent to over 30 free press sites and when I ran a google search on my company name Agencyonnet, it threw up several places where my press release had actually been published.

A lot of hard work searching the Net and actually going beyond page 5 of the Google helped! Most people tend to give up after page 1. And if you have about $15 to $20 to spare, save yourself the trouble and hand over your press release to a professional press release submission site like ABN Newswire. As an entrepreneur I did both.

Build your own website

Make no mistake. The Internet is where most people will head to find out more about a company or a brand or a service. And the beauty of the Internet is that you can look as big, as sexy, and as great as the biggest brands in the world.

Invest your time and money in building a great website. Nobody knows your business or your customers more than you do. You therefore need to spend time building your own wireframes. A wireframe is nothing but a way a website will be laid out. You know what your customers will come looking to your site for.

Prepare your prospect contact list

Sit down and prepare a list of all your business and personal contacts. You can also scrub the Internet for prospective clients. This is a pain staking job and that’s where the interns you have hired will come in use. Sit with them and guide them how to find relevant business contacts from the Internet. There are a host of directories to try. You should at the same time begin scanning and preparing as comprehensive a list of open forums, blogs, newsmagazines, open communities where your target audience are present. You will need to begin engagement with them hence having a comprehensive database of contacts and locations on the net is a good way to start.

Begin your social engagement

Devise your social media approach. What will you post? What will you comment. Who will you comment to? Frequency? Content? I would suggest reading up as much as you can in this area. There are several better qualified people who run blogs and have articles devoted to this subject.

What I would leave you with, is a tip is to be socially very active across your top 3-4 social media sites. Join as many groups on LinkedIn that are relevant to your business. Remember LinkedIn only allows one to join 50 groups so be choosy. Follow posts of others closely and comment where you feel is relevant. Avoid over spamming your connections with sales messages. Nobody likes it. Once in a while I guess everyone lives with it. Over spamming will get you booted out.

When you do comment, make sure that your comment is meaningful and relevant. You are the face of your company and the more you are visible, the more your company will get known. Share relevant facts and tips to your audience. You may come across an article that you find relevant. Share it with the group. Likewise on Facebook. Find out groups and communities that share the same interest as your business. Scan through Quora for questions that beg an answer relevant to your business. Post questions yourself. Start discussions on LinkedIn.

Keep your interns busy full time as your social media managers under your supervision. It’s an experience that the will always remember and carry forward to their real job.

Make some videos

Video is the fastest growing media on the Internet. You tube is great. The only catch is the cost of making a video which puts off most entrepreneurs. Don’t let that scare you away. You can make fairly professional looking videos all by yourself if you have the time. All you need is a good HD quality Digital camera, a good video editing software like the Power Director, some sound tracks and you’re good to go.

During the initial months when I was yet to launch my site Agencyonnet, I spent a couple of days experimenting with video. I wanted to recruit some young post grads and thought it would be a great idea to showcase my company culture through a video. The problem was that a professional video was costing way beyond what I could afford to spend. So I spent a few days searching the Net and created the video myself. I won’t say it was 100% professional looking but as a first attempt it was a good one. I managed to improve the number of post grads applying for my company by a whopping 100% after I uploaded the video. The total cost? About $50 for a one time license for the Power Director Video editor, which by far is the easiest to use and about $10 for the sound track license and about ½ a day to shoot and then edit the video. I have in mind several more videos to make now that I know it can be done!

Benchmark. Test. Benchmark. Test

You want to be a whizz at marketing? Benchmark and test everything that you have never done before.

This will ensure that when you do have the money to spend on marketing, you will know exactly what needs to be scaled up or down and where. As a startup entrepreneur and a marketer, I have always tested whenever I am trying out something new and benchmarking them. Testing lets me know what I am doing right and what I am doing wrong.

What more can a bootstrapped marketing entrepreneur want?

Every business big or small need to have a thought through marketing plan for their growth. Large companies have plans that run into several power point presentations and pages while startups have plans that pretty much occupy half the space on a paper napkin. Some business owners put it down on paper while others carry out their plan with an intrinsic gut feel. But the fact remains everyone at some level or the other work on a marketing plan.

Why develop a plan in the first place?

Having a marketing plan helps business in several ways. One, it helps the business owner understand and set clear business goals for the money, time or resources he has invested into marketing. Secondly, and, it helps articulate the company’s goals, vision and growth plan for all its employees and investors.

While having a marketing plan is no guarantee of success, not having one will certainly lead to a disaster. Trying to grow your business without a thought through marketing plan is akin to driving your car at night on an un-known road without headlights, hoping that there is no ditch in the way and hoping that you will reach your destination.

To help the first time marketer understand the intricate details of how a marketing plan is developed and put into motion, let’s make a practical plan for a fictitious company named Alcone Products Inc. This will help understand better how to prepare a plan for your own company.

About Alcone Products Inc.

Alcone Products Inc. is a family run business from sunny Florida. It manufacturers and markets a range of biscuits under the brand name “Figurz”. Figurz biscuits comes in multiple shapes and sizes and also includes a whole range of kid biscuits in the shape of animal characters. Figurz is also made from whole wheat and is considered a healthy snacking option when on the move and does not lead to fat gain.

Alcone has been marketing Figurz nationally now for the past 8 years and has a decent distribution system in place in both traditional and large format stores. It is however facing increasing competition by more modern brands with large advertising budgets and for the past few years has been having low to flat sales growth which is hitting the company bottom line due to increased operations costs.

Traditionally Alcone has been running trade schemes and trade incentive programs as a means of ensuring distribution coverage and depth. But with low consumer sales and interest, retail stores are beginning to question the brand’s future. In this scenario Mike, the company’s founder finally decides that he has to now turn to doing ‘something’ around marketing to boost his brand’s fortune.

Let’s help Mike get his brand back in place by following these critical steps

Marketing Business Goal setting

Setting a marketing business goal will help give shape to the marketing plan. How do you set a marketing business goal?

You decide what you want to achieve through marketing efforts. This could be any of the following

Sales Revenue – How much you want to generate by way of sales

Sales Volume- How much you want to generate by way of units sold

New consumer acquisition- How many new consumers you want who should adopt your brand.

Increased brand usage- You perhaps want your existing consumers to buy more of the same product?

Improved brand awareness- You want to increase the brand recall and perception of your brand or perhaps you want to change it?

Increase distribution width- Perhaps you want your product enter new geographies or new distribution channels?

Increase distribution depth – Perhaps you want to increase your distribution depth in a particular channel that has better ROI?

You could set one goal and several secondary goals from a marketing perspective. The important thing is to set a goal. As one can see from the above, each of them will force the marketing team to work in particular direction.

Mike says “Guys lets increase sales revenue. Everything else can wait. “

Develop the overall marketing strategy

Mike’s clear cut objective is to increase the brand’s overall sales revenue. Since increasing the price is not an option because of flat sales, the marketing team has to now focus on ways to increase volumes so that overall sales revenues can be met.

In this particular case let’s take a quick look at the options in front of the marketing team if they have to increase the volume

They can hope to get existing stores to stock up more by offering a larger trade incentive program.

They can hope to open up another distribution channel which can lead to greater unit sales

They can get consumers to buy more of the same – increase usage

They can get more new consumers to try and start using the brand

Given the constraints under which Mike and Alcone are operating it seems wishful thinking for A & B. The brand has no marketing support and generally speaking trying to open a new distribution channel would be un-successful on a flat sales mode.

Mike says “Guy’s unless you can come up with a secret ingredient that makes our customers want to eat more biscuits I suggest you’ll focus your efforts on D. Get me more consumers!”

Given the business owner’s dictate, let’s start exploring what strategic options are available for us by which we could develop an overall strategy for marketing.

If we have to increase the consumer base we would need to attract new consumers to the brand, make them try it, help them like it and help them become regular product users. A Typical consumer goes through the following stages before he becomes a regular user of a brand. At each stage a new consumer is likely to opt out of considering the brand which should be factored into the planning if our objective is to increase revenues through higher volume sales from new consumers.

The overall marketing strategy now takes shape

Mike says – “Good show guys. But I have a question. Who are we going to target? We obviously can’t afford to reach out to the entire American population! We don’t have the monies to do it! “

Which brings us back to the next step in our development of the marketing plan

Defining the Target Audience

As Mike stated above, often business owners are faced with a challenge while defining who their customer is when deciding on a promotional or marketing plan. It’s quite easy to say “anyone because everyone buys and eats biscuits.”. But the fact remains that unless you’ve got a marketing budget like the big packaged good brands, the chances are you’re budget will not buy you a 10 second spot on national television.

As an SME you therefore need to not just make your marketing money work more efficiently, you also need to make yourself work more efficiently. Honing on a consumer segment within your overall consumer universe will help not just sharpen your communication to a relevant audience but also help you optimize on your spends effectively.

How do you therefore define your target audience? Well, some of the ways you could do are:

You could define them by age and say “ my target audience will be kids between 5 to 12 because I have a brand that comes in several shapes including Animal shapes and this could be fun for kids”

You could define them by gender and say “ my target audience will be mothers who have young kids because my brand is a the healthy snacking product and all mothers hate letting their kids have

You could also define your target audience by behavior or psychographically by saying “My audience are adults who are health conscious and would like to snack occasionally with a healthy product. My brand name is also called Figurz which I can sublimely use to connote that I am a healthy snack”

Each of the above three definitions of our target audience as one would be able to see gives a sharper focus on our marketing plan and at the same time gives a directional shape to our communication messaging and our promotional mix. In the absence of the above Mike might have been simply advertising “Biscuits” but with the above three segments he is no longer just a biscuit manufacturer but a dream seller.

Would you rather be a vanilla manufacturer of your brand or a seller of dreams to your consumer?

Mike says “Wow! I never thought of my brand in this manner. Way to go! I think we should focus on kids because in the long run they would grow up on my brand and in turn when they become parents they would still believe in my brand”

Promotional Mix or the Media Mix

Having decided who your target audience is and the brand’s unique selling proposition for the audience, you need to decide what all you will do and how you will do what you need to do in order to reach out to a large enough audience- in this case kids.

So what are the promotional options or media vehicle options available to us to help Mike?

We could use mass media vehicles like television and place our advertising in kid centric channels as a means of promoting our brand. This is likely to be a very expensive proposition but if you have deep pockets, it’s the best thing to do for a consumer packaged brand. To do this you would need to hire the services of a professional advertising agency or a creative agency who would help you design the communication. You would then need to hire a media buying agency who would help you negotiate costs with television channels and help you buy your media and monitor it.

We could use below-the- line marketing support to reach out to kids at various touch points. Some of these could be schools, community playgrounds, fairs, sports fields, matches etc. We could additionally use this opportunity to conduct sampling of a trial pack to the kids.

We could additionally use the digital medium to reach out to young mothers and provide an on-call sampling pack which could be mailed out to them.

Since our stated objective is to sample the brand in order to generate trials it might work out better if we focused our promotional mix on various touch points, created a smaller trial pack of Figurz and sampled it to the kids.

Sampling is a tried and tested method for consumer packaged goods companies. Of course not everyone you sample will end up buying your brand the second time around and so the larger number you sample, the higher would be the repeat buying phenomena. The big disadvantage of sampling as opposed to other methods of promoting brand awareness is that the pace of operation is slow. But in terms of effectiveness, it scores a 100%, especially in a category like food where aspects such as taste come into play.

Mike says “That’s wonderful folks. So let’s go ahead and do a pilot sampling program and sample Figurz to say 100,000 kids. What say?

Budget preparation and allocation

This is the tricky part of marketing and often marketing plans go back to the drawing board. This is because most marketers start with the wish list of what they would ideally like to do and then work out a budget for it. They then measure it up against the allocated budget from the business owner and usually the wish list budget is far more than the allocated budget available to spend. Back to the chopping board where the budget and the marketing wish list is optimized.

Bad ideas or low ROI ideas are dropped while better ones are optimized. Driving costs down while retaining the marketing objective necessity is a crucial role for business owners who are playing the marketing role themselves.

In order to do an effective budget allocation one needs to break up the marketing task into smaller sub tasks or requirements. In the above sampling requirement the sub requirements in order to effectively do 100,000 sampling would be:

A.You need to make a 100,000 smaller sampling trial packs. This involves a certain production cost.

B. You need to make a promotional leaflet which could possibly go as a carry away by the kid along with the free sample. This could additionally contain a bounce back coupon with a $X off on the next purchase. When the coupon gets refunded back to Mike, he will know exactly how many kids did a repeat purchase and from where. Useful information to know as this is a pilot. Redemption levels can be fine-tuned. You might want to try out different levels of $X off in different geographies in order to better understand the price elasticity that operates.

C. You will need to hire the services of a professional sampling agency or an experiential marketing agency to help you execute the sampling program

For each of the above, you will incur a certain degree of cost and that becomes your budget and your budget allocation.

“Guy’s I want to do this now. Not next quarter. So let’s start putting specific action points and timelines” says Mike.

Action points and timelines

The penultimate task in developing a plan is putting down specific action points that need to be done and assigning dates by when that task would be completed. This allows the business owner to monitor key aspects of the plan and also allocate responsibilities within and outside the team with external third party agencies.

Without this piece of paper work often tends to expand to fill in available time and as Mike said things will slip into next quarter , next half and next year.

Plan Execution

The day finally draws near and you are ready to execute the plan that you have drawn up. You have identified what you will do, what budget you will spend and also what kind of external marketing support service you will need to execute the plan.

Obviously Mike and his small team cannot undertake to do the activity themselves and will need to depend on a marketing agency or more specifically a service provider who has done sampling programs. They will also need the services of a good creative agency who can come up with an interesting and attractive creative communication and lastly they might need the services of a fulfillment agency to handle the coupon redemption.

So what are you waiting for? Grab a pen and paper and draw up a marketing plan for your business!