How to grow your brand and company with marketing

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Many corporate marketers do not understand how buyers buy and how marketing works; this information gap makes for inefficient and costly marketing. Research shows definite patterns in how consumers make purchasing decisions and how brands grow. How well a brand sells depends on how many buyers it has and how often they buy. In theory, a brand can be large, either because a few buyers purchase it frequently or because many people buy it occasionally. 

How Building Your Customer Base with Marketing

Increasing penetration is the best way to expand a brand. You want more customers who buy your products occasionally rather than fewer customers who buy frequently. To boost your customer base and market share, you can retain existing customers, recruit new customers or do both. Most marketers believe retention is cheaper than acquisition.

Defection rates, which measure customer loyalty, also follow the double jeopardy law. The number of customers who leave a brand depends on its category and market share. Defection levels remain about the same among competing brands. Marketers have little control over customer defection, which happens for a variety of reasons, from a family’s move to a change in its needs or budget. 

Marketing to Different Types of Customers

Generally, marketers follow two strategies: mass marketing and target marketing. Mass marketing attempts to reach all the buyers in a category, including the many occasional or light buyers. Target marketing is directed at heavy purchasers or at a specific subset of purchasers. Today, marketers target certain buyers and try to increase customer loyalty. However, brand growth still requires mass marketing. Though they purchase only occasionally, light buyers contribute to brand growth by significantly increasing sales volume. Marketing professionals often forget light buyers because they are harder to attract than heavy buyers. Since heavy buyers purchase a brand more often, they are more aware of its advertising efforts, changes in packaging, sales promotions, and so on. Even so, infrequent light buyers represent the typical consumer across all categories and brands.

Marketing’s most important law, the “Pareto law” or the “80/20” rule, states that 80% of sales come from the top 20% of brand buyers. Marketers often use Pareto’s law to justify targeted strategies that focus on heavy buyers, while disregarding the fact that ignoring light buyers inhibits brand growth. “Put simply, next period your heaviest 20% of customers won’t be so heavy, the light buyers will be heavier and some of the non-buyers will buy. This is the law of buyer moderation.”

Light buyers and those who don’t Light buyers and those who don’t buy a brand at all may become heavy buyers, while heavy buyers may become light buyers. Marketers can predict the impact of this “law of buyer moderation” – which applies to all brands – based on buyer frequency. Success requires that marketing reaches all purchasers and potential purchasers!

So How Do you it

The message you decide to promulgate must be, above all, easy to understand. If your marketing confuses the customer, it will make your sales task more difficult. The best marketing messages are clear and simple, and make no assumptions. Customers follow five steps before deciding to make a purchase. Your job as a marketing professional is to guide the consumer through these steps:

1. Create that awareness, need or desire

2. How are you going to fulfill that need which you just created

3. Create that reason for them to act now, not later

Republished with author's permission from original post.

Patrick Murphy
SiliconCloud provides high-quality, customized solutions to satisfy business objectives by leveraging the online space to drive leads and nurture customer relationships. SiliconCloud's integrated solutions of Web Creative, Analytics, Search Marketing & Social Media is designed to elevate your image, inform sales strategies and drive business. SiliconCloud means having a clear vision. Dozens of organizations in B2B and B2C arenas have counted on SiliconCloud to pave their road to the future by securing their online presence

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