Take Time to Research Your Market

 You’ve got a fantastic product or maybe you’re providing a brilliant service. Great! Business must be thriving.

If it’s not, you need to do something about it fast. You need to do some marketing to find out if people even want your product or service and if there is something about your business you could tweak or change to potentially increase demand.

Marketing is the process of finding out about the goods or services that customers want and presenting them at the right price, how, when and where they want them. 

Marketing should be carried out before starting up a business, yet so many people fail to do it. As a result many businesses cannot survive.

Businesses operate in a hugely competitive marketplace, with everyone often vying for the same customers. In today’s business climate, you can’t afford not to find out everything about the market in which you intend to operate.

It’s much more than advertising or promotion. Marketing starts from producing products that meet people’s needs and extends to making those products available and letting potential customers know of their existence.

The first rule in marketing is that you can only sell something that people want. So you’ve got to know your market. For example, you would be crazy to sell cots and prams in a retirement village or Christmas cards in March. Nobody would want them.

But that doesn’t mean you should never try to sell an unusual or unique product or service. In fact the key to success is often just that – providing a unique service or specialised or personalised products in a mass production market. A fresh idea or a new product can be a marvellous money-spinner if it’s marketed correctly, and if people think that they need it.

 www.astillhawke.co.nz