Understanding Marketing: 5 Common Misconceptions

Everybody seems to know Marketing. The world is full of Marketing gurus. We all talk about with a remarkable ease and confidence, though most of the times we are not Marketing professionals and not even close. What are the most frequent mistakes in understanding Marketing practices and theories?

1. Defining Marketing
There is clearly a general tendency in employing the notion of Marketing within a confusing mix of Public Relations, Advertising, or Media Planning. Regardle…

Keywords:
marketing,misconception,definition,mistake,advertising,theory,concept,business,development,strategy

Everybody seems to know Marketing. The world is full of Marketing gurus. We all talk about with a remarkable ease and confidence, though most of the times we are not Marketing professionals and not even close. What are the most frequent mistakes in understanding Marketing practices and theories?

1. Defining Marketing
There is clearly a general tendency in employing the notion of Marketing within a confusing mix of Public Relations, Advertising, or Media Planning. Regardless of the degree in evolution and growing of Marketing, many of us still cannot understand what Marketing really is and only see the its extreme manifestations. Many believe Marketing is a useless, fancy field, eating up budgets and giving little in return. Others see Marketing as an artistic field, where all you need is creativity to develop a memorable ad.

2. Marketing is still confused with Communication
This common mistake is, again, the result of sufficient understanding of Marketing. Marketing professionals are often thought to be responsible for creating advertisements, logos, slogans. What people usually see is the mere top of the iceberg, forgetting that there is a product, a price and a distribution strategy to be developed before even thinking of advertising.

3. Under- or overestimating the role of the marketer
On one hand, the marketer is often seen as a must-have within a company, but (s)he has an indefinite role and ends up doing a little of everything (Marketing, Advertising, Public Relations, Customer Care, Account Management etc.) On the other hand we might be faced with the other extreme, where the marketer is an omniscient, all-powerful creature eclipsing everyone else.

4. Segmentation
In spite of the abundance in resources and consulting services aimed at researching the consumers base, segmentation is still done intuitively at least at small-business level. Large companies might have whole departments assigned to work on segmentation research and strategy, and still not be fully failure-proof.

5. Marketing for the sake of it
This is an attitude I have met in too many occasions not to mention it. People (and again, small-business owners are the usual culprits) do marketing because everyone else does it, because they heard they should do it, because it is a fashionable thing to do.

Surely, the list above is not exhaustive, and it only points at several attitudes leading nowhere on the Marketing battlefield.

Marketing is surely not an art, thought it does employ a certain flaire and creativity. Marketing is not a science either, but it operates with precise instruments. Marketing is not for everyone and not to be performed regardless of the conjuncture around the business.

We should keep in mind that Marketing operations have a clear objective: increasing the profitability of a business. To bring money, to be more clear. Marketing is therefore just as important as everything else in the company: if a product has functional faults we would blame the production department, but when a product does not sell for reasons beyond production it is usually the Marketing department to take the blame.

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Praise Matters

As a coach, someone helping people improve their performance for the benefit of both the individual and the organization, there are typically two types of feedback that you could provide on their performance at anytime. The most important and most overlooked is positive feedback which I call praise.

Keywords:
constructive feedback, constructive criticism, praise, feedback, positive feedback, criticism, coaching, leadership, encouragement

In working with businesses and organizations of all kinds, I hear the same concerns everyday:

How do we increase productivity?

How do we improve Customer service?

How do we keep people actively engaged in their work and with others on their team?

How do we reduce turnover?

How do we improve safety?

Even if you aren’t thinking about or concerned about every one of those questions, I’m sure at least one of them has kept you up at night in the past.

As leaders we think about these things because they impact the success of the organization. As coaches we think about how to impact these things day-to-day, person-by-person.

As a coach, someone helping people improve their performance for the benefit of both the individual and the organization, there are typically two types of feedback that you could provide on their performance at anytime. Constructive feedback (sometimes called criticism) and positive feedback (which I will call praise).

Forgetting the words for a minute, these two types of information are important to anyone trying to do anything better. We need to know what we aren’t doing quite right, so we can adjust, and we need to know what we are doing well, so we can replicate that. Makes sense doesn’t it?

Now, let’s look at the words. I looked up criticism in my thesaurus and here is what I found:

“1. censure, faultfinding, disapproval, condemnation, disparagement 2. a judgment, evaluation, appraisal, analysis, assessment, estimation, valuation, 2 b critique, review, commentary.

I also looked up the word praise, and found:

“v. 1 acclaim, laud, applaud, pay tribute to, compliment, commend, eulogize, extol, honor, sing the praises of, pay homage to, endorse…”

Now, think about these two lists of synonyms. Granted, not all of them make sense in a business context, but ask yourself these questions:

· Which of these things have I received more of in my professional life?

· Which of them motivates and inspires me to strive for greater achievement and higher performance?

And now with your coach’s hat on, think about these questions:

· Which of these things do I share more often?

· Which will help me most inspire and motivate others to reach their potential?

If you are like me and most everyone I’ve ever discussed this with, you have received more negative, “constructive” feedback than positive, encouraging feedback at work. And you believe that with more encouragement or praise you might have been more successful quicker.

The point in two words?

Praise matters.

Want some more proof?

According to a Gallup survey outlined in the book, How Full is Your Bucket? 61% of American workers received no praise at work last year. 61%! And the #1 reason people leave their jobs is because the feel unappreciated.

It is undeniably true. You can prove it from your personal experiences and from the hard data. Praise matters. And it is vastly underused as a coaching tool by most people most of the time.

As you finish reading this and walk away from your desk and begin interacting with people (whether you coach them or not), keep these things in mind:

· Everyone needs recognition and reassurance. Hopefully the exercise and the data above confirm this fact for you.

· Praise gives us pride in our jobs. Given a choice, would you rather have people who take pride in their work, or not?

· Praise generates enthusiasm and commitment. Committed people can work miracles, so it pays to build commitment.

· Praise builds loyalty. What are the real and hidden costs of employee turnover?

· Praise prevents people from feeling taken for granted. When people feel taken for granted they are less committed and loyal, aren’t they?

· Praise motivates us to “go the extra mile.” The extra mile is often where we find satisfied customers, higher returns and more.

· Praise improves our relationships. Would you like to have better relationships with those you lead, coach and work with?

· Praise takes hardly any time and costs nothing. There are few things in life that can produce such great returns for such a small investment.

Get that praise tool out of your toolbox. Dust it off and allow it to become shiny with use. It is an easy tool to use. It is a fun tool to use. You might even want to take it out of your mental toolbox and lay it on top of your desk so you remember to use it more often.

If you want answers to the questions at the beginning of this article, start with praise, because praise matters.

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Project Management – The Plans

Your early Project Management duties are complete and you now need to get down to the nitty gritty of day to day detail, which is what we’ll discuss in this article.

Keywords:
project management

When you put the bid together, one of your most important pieces of documentation was the Project Management Plan. This document will be your bible from now on, in particular the programme plan, which will take the form of a bar chart or similar and which you will probably want to pin onto the wall of your office. This will show you the state of the project at a glance, including all the important dates and milestones, especially payment milestones. If your plan was formulated using detailed activities for each milestone, you will need to check with the milestone owners that these are still valid. If you didn’t use detailed activities, you might want to start now. I firmly believe that the secret of successful Project Management is attention to detail. In a complex project, it is all too easy to lose track of some seemingly insignificant little job or item which turns out to be vital to the conclusion of a milestone. Get your team to think of every tiny little thing that they will need, especially for the early milestones and make sure that the plan is always up to date.

One of your early milestones will almost certainly be to formally issue all your other documents as well as the Project Management Plan, as these will have been at draft issue only for the bid. This means organising the review and signing off by senior personnel of your Quality Plan, Development Plan (if any), Sub-Contract Management Plan and Configuration Management Plan, to name but a few. These will then require delivery to and acceptance by, your customer.

Your Risk Management Plan is another priority and will also need constant update and review. Make sure that your Risk Manager checks with all risk owners that they haven’t any new information which may affect the handling of an early risk. For example, say one of your risks was that one of your software engineers would only be available to you part time because Project X was approaching a crucial milestone and might need extra resources. Your Technical Lead now tells you that Project X has achieved that milestone with no problems and won’t need your software engineer. You can now knock that risk off your list, you don’t need to worry about it any more and you won’t need to put the fall back or mitigation plans in place. Risk Management is a complex subject so we won’t delve into it further here, suffice to say, it is crucial to good project management.

Lastly, on the subject of plans, make sure that your Procurement Manager is monitoring the plans needed from your sub-contractors, if any. These may be stand-alone plans for complex sub-contracts or may just be a contributory paragraph to some of your project plans. Either way, they still need to be delivered in time for project management review and inclusion in the delivery of your document package to your customer.

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Reading Trade Shows Report

Have you wondered how people work out the viability of major trade shows? How they calculate what is feasible and what is not? When it is feasible and when it is not? This is where Trade Show Reports enter the equation.

These reports are written by data analysts who forecast the future growth of the market. The information contained in the reports allows for the individualized planning of trade shows that anticipate the needs of invitees.

What information belongs in a T…

Keywords:
touch,media,design,catalog,printing,marketing,paper,tips,product,photography,photo,graphic,layout

Have you wondered how people work out the viability of major trade shows? How they calculate what is feasible and what is not? When it is feasible and when it is not? This is where Trade Show Reports enter the equation.

These reports are written by data analysts who forecast the future growth of the market. The information contained in the reports allows for the individualized planning of trade shows that anticipate the needs of invitees.

What information belongs in a Trade Show Report? Let us look at the following points:

Management associations coordinates (phone and address)
Location for trade shows and dates
Statistics of the show – how many square feet, how many stalls/booths, how many companies are expected
What industry segment(s) took part
Ranking of the events and shows separately and comparatively
Total market size estimate
Benchmarks
Forecasts of market vis-а-vis high ranking products

Data corresponding to the above points will be collected with the help of questionnaires, interviews, and personal discussions. The correct interpretation of data can create a report which will serve as a guide for successfully organizing the next trade show(s).

There are many other trade show reports which cover other aspects, such as:

Analysis of key industries
Possibility of the industry to hire
Whether revenue from exhibitions will rise or fall in the current year
Global, national and regional major growth strategies
Is the cyberspace killing the tradeshows – how much does it matter
Will investment be high in the current year
What growth percentage is expected in the presented this year

Trade show reports are mostly used as guides. But many times they are also used as a follow-up measure as well. There are reports which look particularly at the profile of the customers and try to organize the data captured to draw an accurate picture of the return on investment from the past trade shows, as well as forecast the future trends.

The trade shows reports are invaluable tools to understand how customer behavior, market growth, or recession rates indicate the industries which will grow best, and the demand of products.

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Is Medical Factoring Right for your Medical Office?

Are you waiting up to 90 days to get your claims paid by insurance and medicare/medicaid? Learn how to get paid in two days with factoring.

Keywords:
medical factoring,medical accounts receivable factoring,medical receivables factoring

If you own a medical office that is growing, sooner or later you’ll run into cash flow issues. Unfortunately, every business that is growing – regardless of industry – runs into them.

When faced with cash flow problems, most medical offices try to get a business loan or a line of credit. Although business loans can work well, they are not a panacea. For starters, they are not easy to get. But more importantly, they have set maximums. This means that you may outgrow the business loan if your business keeps growing quickly. This is a very important point because once you have outgrown a loan, it is very difficult to try and get a new one. The first one must be paid off.

A better option may be medical factoring. Medical factoring is a financing tool designed to help medical offices. It eliminates the 60 to 90 days it takes to get claims paid and accelerates payment time to between 2 to 7 days. This can be a huge advantage if slow paying claims have put you at risk of:

1. Missing payroll
2. Missing rent or other payments
3. Delaying important hiring decisions

Medical factoring can provide you with:
1. Funds to meet payroll
2. Funds to pay rent and vendors
3. Financing based on your claims. The more you bill – the more financing you get

As opposed to business loans, medical factoring is easy to qualify for. The main requirement is that your office be up to date in taxes and be free of any tax or commercial liens. And it’s also quick to set up. It usually takes about 10 days to set up an account for initial funding, but all subsequent fundings happen within 24 hours of submitting the request. The process is very simple:

1. You submit claims to insurance companies and send a copy to the factoring company

2. The factoring company advances between 70% – 85% of your net expected collections

3. You get immediate funds. The factoring company waits to get paid

4. Once the factoring company is paid, the transaction is settled.

Because of this, medical factoring is an ideal tool to streamline your medical office’s cash flow.

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How To Make Use Of Cheap Internet Banner Advertising

For years now, internet banner advertising has captured the World Wide Web for it has become a large help in saving an amount of money while reaching beyond territories. Banner advertising played a major part in market trafficking all over the internet and many individuals and companies have bought themselves these cheap internet banner advertising. Some made use of it financially; others have no idea on what to do with it.

With your cheap internet banner advertisement, wo…

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For years now, internet banner advertising has captured the World Wide Web for it has become a large help in saving an amount of money while reaching beyond territories. Banner advertising played a major part in market trafficking all over the internet and many individuals and companies have bought themselves these cheap internet banner advertising. Some made use of it financially; others have no idea on what to do with it.

With your cheap internet banner advertisement, would you just sit in front of your computer and wait for people to notice you? Would you let your company get trampled by other company’s marketing strategies?

Okay, so you admit you bought internet banner advertising, but does that mean you won’t do anything about it because it costs cheap?

These following steps will help you get up on your feet and make your cheap internet banner advertising priceless. With these simple instructions, there will always have traffic on your website.

First, to be able to capture the attention of your target audience, your title and topic should be thought of with concern. You have to make the people believe that your cheap internet banner advertising is worthy of their time. The advertisement has to meet the audience’s need.

For the people to bring attention to your internet banner advertising, you should be able to raise the curiosity and convince the people. You should be able to deliver your products or services with strong words that may lead the target audience at deciding.

You should be able to constructs words on your advertisements that could lead the target audience that you are directly talking to them to give a sense of familiarity on your services.

As you persuade the people by calling for them and directing them to buy or entail your services, they give importance to your business proposal. Your cheap internet-based banner advertising will become one of the sought for ads there are.

Make sure to present your ads to the global community repeatedly to get them familiar with you and your services.

Always remember that having a website doesn’t mean it could sell products by itself. You must be sure to accompany it with marketing strategies. By buying banner advertising, you or your company would save time and money while achieving market sales. These internet banners advertising may come cheap, but it could lead you or your company to riches.

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Website Marketing With Buying Website Traffic

Most of us know that bringing targeted traffic to a website is vital for your online business success. But most of us do not know how to bring targeted customers to their website. How do you do? Do you buy website traffic? Or do you just exchange links to get free traffic?

Keywords:
Buy Traffic, Website Traffic, Targeted Traffic

So you bought a domain name and also built yourself a nice and shiny new website to showcase your business. It’s got loads of info on it about how great you are, maybe even an online shop with all your products. But how do you tie this strange new world of ecommerce in with your traditional methods? How do you utilise ‘online marketing’ when you’re not really sure what it is?
Tell people about your website

You probably have a mailing list of existing customers; every so often you print a few thousand leaflets or Christmas cards and send them out with reminders and special offers. For the same cost as this, you can tell these same people about your website. Print the web address and get word out; include incentives just like you normally would, a promotional code for example.

Measure the returns of your offline marketing

Got a brand new range of sportswear in your shop? Create a custom page telling all about it and print the URL on your flyer. If people are impressed with your mailing, they’ll visit the page. Most importantly, you can track numbers by installing an analytics package on your website (like Google Analytics). Every time someone visits that particular page, you know they’ve come because of your leaflet.

Be sure that the page you make reflects your mailing; customer experience is key and by emphasising the connection between what they get in the post and what they see on their screen, you’ll make visitors comfortable with your brand.

Track visitor behaviour

Utilise cookies to track what visitors to your website are doing (your analytics package will do this). Maybe they land on your special page but don’t click through to anywhere else. Maybe they get halfway through the payment process and then give up. With this information you can identify problem areas and fix them. This is something your offline marketing alone could never tell you.

Build your online presence

Having a website and telling your customers about it may not be enough to make it profitable. Think about how many new people walk into your shop every day; do the same number visit your website? An online marketing strategy might be necessary to give you a presence on the internet, making sure you’ll be found by potential customers. This involves gaining trust with the search engines so that you come up in the results, or advertising on other websites that your target market visits.

Pay per click campaigns and search engine optimisation strategies can be managed yourself or by specialist online marketing companies. Pay per click is advertising on the search engines (or other websites) – paying to get onto the first page of results. Search engine optimisation identifies keywords you want to be found for and optimises your website so that it appears high up in the natural search results. If someone searches for ’sportswear’ and you come up, you’ve got yourself a new visitor.

This may all sound a little complicated, but just think how many people search for ’sportswear’ every day. Hundreds? Thousands? These are all potential visitors to your site, so investing in your online presence really can pay off.

Gather visitor data and use it wisely

We’ve come full circle with our website marketing; having a sign-up box on your website to gather email addresses or other details allows you to build up a mailing list. Just like sending out leaflets, you can send out emails (or more leaflets if you like) with special offers and promotional codes. Remind people about your website, and strengthen awareness of your brand.

If people have an account with you, track what they buy and target your marketing accordingly. Tailored promotions are far more effective; think about Amazon.com’s ‘recommendations’ feature. Using offline methods in the online world can be the most effective way of ensuring repeat business, especially when you utilise all the extra information your online strategy gives you.

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