About Business For You

One of the phrases that my business partner, James Orr, has coined inside real-estate investing realm is the actual fact that "everything starts with motivated sellers." Without motivated sellers, there aren't properties to buy, rentals to place tenants in, fixer uppers to flip, or deals to wholesale. This is such an important aspect of real-estate investing that it's almost a mantra for that way that James and scores of other successful property investors run their businesses. The key to getting in touch with motivated sellers happens being marketing.

I guess a good place to start out on this discussion is to define what marketing is. Google define informs us that marketing is "the process of planning and executing the conception, pricing, promotion and distribution of ideas, products or services to satisfy customers." Marketing really does contain greater than what most people think it does. Marketing is a much more than only the activities that drive sales. Rather, marketing encompasses all the activities that seek to spot what consumers want and how to promote and deliver those goods and services.

Before an individual or company ever even helps to create the decision to make a selected product or service, they ought to first spend the time and to determine whether there's even a market to the offering. If you will quickly realize there's demand, they then need to discover how to have that offering for the consumers looking it, how you can tell consumers that it is available, and how you can price it in ways that there is certainly money left for a profit. This is part of the marketing process, and really should occur ahead of the product is even produced.

In more common usage of the term, "marketing" is usually seen as merely the promotional aspect of the product or service which is already available. This section of marketing consists of developing the buyer alert to what you are offering, and convincing these to buy it. There is really a tendency in corporate environments to separate the marketing and purchasers functions into disparate departments, that is often a mistake. The purpose with the promotional part of marketing is always to drive sales, and therefore both functions are intricately connected. A good example of the disconnect between those two departments occurs when firms that sell capital equipment have vastly more people of their marketing departments than they certainly within their field sales force. Another example is when marketing and product development folks disregard the input through the field sales personnel. This input is frequently produced from actual customer contact, which most employees of large organizations don't experience.

The prime reason for considered one of my blogs is always to test marketing promotions using an enormous array of messages, media, and markets, which can be often referred to because three M's of marketing. Before we conduct a test, we first do some background research to ascertain if there exists a good market for what we're considering selling, and that we analyze whether we could no less than break even around the marketing test using certain realistic assumptions about sales ratios. Pricing strategy can also be something we discuss a lot before launching a new test. The actual progression of sales copy, writing and placing ads, creating measurement systems, etc., comes later within the process. Making sales and tracking metrics, then tweaking the marketing, comes next.

Sadly, many companies don't view the significance of marketing. Because of this, they fail to plan for rough spots in the business cycle, including off seasons, economic downturns, and other events. As the cliche goes, "failing to organize is planning to fail." Every business really should have an advertising and marketing plan of some sort, and it will be in writing. Companies that don't "do" marketing will invariably fail.

In short, without marketing there aren't any sales. And without sales, there is no revenue. And without revenue, any organization will quickly succumb to the statistics that show that nearly 2/3 of most businesses fail inside their first 4 years.