Marketing 101

What is Marketing?

Most people are frightened by the idea. But there are really just some very simple components to marketing.

• message
• target market
• the method/vehicle of communication

All marketing involves clarifying the above points.

What is the message you want to get across? Are you a new actor on the scene looking for representation? Are you a watercolour painter with an exhibition coming up? Are you a singer in a band with a gig at a local coffee shop?
All of these are messages you might want to get out to the market place.

It’s worth drilling down into your message to be as specific as possible. Messages of ‘I’m great and here I am!’ are seldom successful a) because they rely on you telling people how great you are (instead of letting them reach that conclusion themselves) and b) because it doesn’t tell them what you want from them.

Always have a ‘call to action‘. What you want them to do. Whether call you in for an interview, buy a painting or book a ticket to your gig. You should always have a call to action in your message.

Target list

Who do you want to speak to?

There’s no point in going after a plumbers convention to sell your watercolour paintings (unless they happen to be of pipes or water cisterns). There’s no point in advertising your acting talents to nursery school teachers if what you want is an agent.

So WHO do you want to take action? The clearer you can be about who you want to attract, or respond to your ‘call of action’, the better you can be.

Vehicle

Now you have a message and you have a target, so now you have to figure out HOW you can connect with them. Where do they hang out? Maybe you can put up a poster and hand out some flyers?

Or maybe they are accessible online (email, Facebook, Twitter etc) and you can connect with them there?

Maybe you need to gather up postal addresses and mail them something?

Or maybe you need to do all three? (Probably, plus many other ways of reaching them).

There are endless ways you can get your message to your target audience and marketing is the act of conveying the message to the audience.

There’s not too much more to it than that.

Finally, you want to try and track your results. Marketing takes up time and resources so you want to know that you are getting something in return.

So figure out how you can track results. If you mail out 50 letters, how many responses do you get? If you follow the letters up with a phone call, do you get a better result? Can you split the group up and send out one letter to 25 of them and a different letter to another 25 and track which letter gets better results? Do your tweets get retweeted more if you send them first thing in the morning or if you send them after lunch?

It’s not rocket science but by tracking your results you will begin to see what marketing efforts work best for you.

There are a million different ways to go about marketing, but the most important thing is that you do it. Start today. And keep doing it. Marketing is an iterative process, meaning it’s something you do over and over again.

It’s the repetition, testing and constantly trying new things which will lead to success in marketing.

So hit the comment button below and let me know what your biggest obstacle to either starting or continuing your marketing is?