YMCA of Greater Toronto assisting entrepreneurs

What should you do if you have little or no money to start a business? What should you do if your marketing knowledge is far from being perfect? YMCA of Greater Toronto runs a program that can help you with that.

As part of the program, I recently ran a workshop introducing new entrepreneurs to customized marketing and promotion strategies. Following are a few points on entrepreneurial marketing I made during the workshop.

A customer-oriented approach

Marketing plays a central role in the virtuous business cycle: acquisition/retention of a profitable customer base, long-term profits, shareholder value, resources and capital, and back to the starting point. In today's turbulent environments, the best approach is known as "customer-oriented". It emphasizes:

• gathering of, sharing of, and responsiveness to market intelligence,
• management of customers as assets,
• outperforming competitors and
• cross-functional integration.

The process starts with an (unbiased) assessment of customers' needs and wants, and continues with product development, not the other way around. If you follow this process, nothing except money can stop you from doing high quality marketing. But lack of funding is a challenging task. If your only choice is low-cost marketing, you have to be creative.

A clear idea about what marketing strategy is

Because they are both "strategies", there is confusion between "management" and "marketing" strategies - but there shouldn't be. It is important therefore to draw a line between them:

• Management strategy centers on the idea that a portfolio of companies, business units, products etc. generates the positive outcome of any portfolio (risk minimization for a given level of return),
• Marketing strategy stems from another idea, that the goal of greater return can be achieved by voluntary focus on the most attractive opportunities, through segmentation, targeting and positioning.

It might seem that management and marketing strategies are totally different, which is both false and true. It is false because both strategies do focus on the market and it is true because they have different responsibilities.

A combination of attractiveness and probability of success

You cannot engage in a market based only on its attractiveness, but you must always take into account a combination of market attractiveness and your own probability of success. The classic mistake is to pursue market opportunities because of a single reason (e.g., "we are first"), only to succumb to followers' and imitators' competition.

A systematic approach

• Always do marketing,
• Create and execute a marketing strategy,
• Budget for marketing,
• Consider outsourcing,
• Dedicate time,
• Always have marketing materials handy,
• Market yourself.

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