Entrepreneur

13.MY MARKETING MIX

Many people believe that marketing is all about PR, advertising and sales. In fact, this discipline is much broader and is ultimately about optimizing the use of the company's total resources to achieve well-defined goals. Because it is focused on resource allocation, it is also very much about what not to do. For instance, usually, you should not stray from your core competency. And usually, you should neither start projects without synergy to the rest nor scale parts of the company if the others cannot follow. In this chapter, we will walk through most of the important marketing tools that are available for you through your company’s expansion.

A good starting point for the company's marketing strategy is its elevator pitch, which we described in Chapter 9. In more classical marketing terms this is an expression of the company vision and mission.

This leads directly to segmentation whereby you normally divide the target market into groups (segments). Yes, ‘normally’, because with the emergence of big data in more and more businesses, you can largely skip segmentation and go straight to individualization – more about that in a minute.

Segmentation approaches

Let's start with classical segmentation. Here, you ask questions such as ‘Which groups of customers do we sell to?’ and ‘How are they different?’ If it is manufacturers, distributors or other companies, one speaks about business-to-business markets. If you sell to the public sector (government), ...