Introduction

Marketing focuses on attracting customers, getting them to buy, and making sure they’re happy enough with their purchases that they come back for more. What could be more important?

Marketing is part science, part art, and it can be challenging to bottle up both parts into a winning campaign. Your business (or nonprofit or service agency) needs to do a lot, including

Communicating what it does clearly and well

Presenting a positive, compelling brand identity

Focusing its resources where they’ll do the most good

Growing its market share by attracting and retaining good customers or clients

Great communications, clear strategies, and tight planning pave the way to success, along with creative implementation.

This book is the third edition of Marketing For Dummies. Since I researched and wrote the first edition (as well as the companion to this book, Marketing Kit For Dummies, 3rd Edition), I’ve benefited from the experiences and questions of thousands of readers. Now, in this book, I’m excited to share all the improvements and additions that come with a fresh, new edition. I’ve added many more tips and quick-action ideas to help you find solutions and take steps that can produce an impact on sales and profits quickly and successfully.

About This Book

I wrote Marketing For Dummies, 3rd Edition, to help you do that critical job of marketing as well as you possibly can. I wrote with a variety of marketers in mind, including small business owners and entrepreneurs who wear the marketing-and-sales hat along with several other hats. I also wrote for managers and staffers of larger organizations who work on plans, programs, product launches, ad campaigns, printed materials, Web sites, and other elements of their organizations’ outreach to customers and prospects. Every marketer needs to smarten his or her approach, embrace new strategies and media, and find ways to increase impact while reducing costs. Those are my goals as an author, too.

Marketing can be a great deal of fun — it is, after all, the most creative area of most businesses. In the long run, however, marketing is all about the bottom line. So although I had fun writing this book and think you can enjoy using it, I take the subject matter very seriously. Any task that brings you to this book is vitally important, and I want to make sure that the advice you get here helps you perform especially well.

Conventions Used in This Book

This book has a few specific conventions that you should know before diving into the pages that follow:

Marketing program: This phrase refers to any organized, coordinated use of sales, advertising, publicity, customer service, the Web, direct mail, or any other efforts to contact and influence customers. Creating a marketing program means avoiding random or disconnected activities. It also means thinking about how everything interlinks and contributes to achieving your marketing goals.

Customer: This is whoever buys what you sell. This customer can be a person, a household, a business, a government agency, a school, or even a voter. Whoever it is, I still call him your customer, and the rules of sound marketing still apply to him.

Product: This is whatever you sell or offer to customers, whether it’s a good, service, idea, or even a person (such as a political candidate or a celebrity). Your product can be animate or inanimate, tangible or intangible. Even if you offer a service, that’s considered a product in marketing jargon.

Sales: I treat person-to-person sales as one of the many possible activities under the marketing umbrella. You need to integrate selling, which is its own highly sophisticated and involved field, into the broader range of activities designed to help bring about sales and satisfy customers. I address ways of managing sales better as part of my overall efforts to make each and every one of your marketing activities more effective.

Last but not least, I also include these standard For Dummies conventions:

Bold indicates keywords in bulleted lists.

Italics highlight words I’m defining or emphasizing.

Monofont indicates a Web address. (I don’t insert extra characters if a URL breaks across a line. If you type what you see, you’ll wind up at the right spot.)

Foolish Assumptions

I assume that you’re intelligent, which is great because you need to be clever, caring, and persistent to do marketing well. But, although I believe you’re intelligent, I bet you don’t have all the technical knowledge you may need to do great marketing, so I explain each technique as clearly as I can.

I also assume that you’re willing to try new ideas in order to improve sales and grow your organization. After all, marketing requires an open mind and a willingness to experiment and try new ideas and techniques.

Of course, I also assume that you’re willing and able to switch from being imaginative and creative one moment to being analytical and rigorous the next, because being successful at marketing requires both approaches. Sometimes I ask you to run the numbers and do sales projections. Other times I ask you to dream up a clever way to catch a reader’s eye and communicate a benefit to that person. These demands pull you in opposite directions. If you can assemble a team of varied people, some of them numbers oriented and some of them artistic, you can cover all the marketing bases more easily. But if you have a small business, you may be all you have, so you need to wear each hat in turn. (At least you never get bored tackling marketing’s varied challenges!)

I certainly do not assume you have an unlimited budget. Most marketers are eager to find low-cost marketing methods, so I emphasize economical approaches throughout this book.

How This Book Is Organized

Marketing For Dummies, 3rd Edition, is organized into six specific parts. Check out the Table of Contents for more information on the topics of the chapters within each part.

Part I: Designing a Great Marketing Program

Military strategists know that great battles must be won first in the general’s tent, with carefully considered plans and accurate maps, before the general commits any troops to the battlefield. Granted, no lives are at stake in marketing, but you do hold the future success of your organization in your hands. I advocate just as careful an approach to analysis and planning as if you were a general on the eve of battle. In Chapter 1, I show you how to make sure you have an efficient, effective marketing program (meaning a coordinated set of marketing activities). In Chapter 2, I show you how to base your program on strong, aggressive strategies that maximize your chances of sales and success. And in Chapter 3, I help you write your strategies and tactics down in a plan of action that you can be reasonably confident will actually work.

Part II: Leveraging Your Marketing Skills

Great marketing requires a wide range of special skills. If you don’t already have all of them, this part shores up any gaps and helps you take advantage of specialized tools and techniques.

Chapter 4 covers how to find out what you need to know in order to develop better strategies and design better ads and other elements of your marketing program. Chapter 5 shares that most precious and hard-to-capture of marketing skills: the marketing imagination. When marketers can bottle up a little of this magic and work it into their marketing programs, good things happen. Chapter 6 addresses how to effectively communicate with customers. Good ideas plus clear, interesting communications add up to better marketing.

Part III: Advertising for Fun and Profit

Advertising is the traditional cornerstone of marketing. Firms combined advertisements with sales calls back in the early days of marketing, and great things happened to their revenues. In this part, I show you how to create compelling, effective ads, brochures, and fliers on paper — the traditional medium of marketing. You can run full-page color ads in national magazines if you have a big budget, or you can place small, cheap black-and-white ads in a local newspaper. Either tactic may prove effective with the right creativity and design. Everyone can access radio and TV these days too, regardless of budget, if you know how to use these media economically and well. However, you may also want to use perhaps the simplest — and most powerful — form of advertising: the sign, from signs on buildings, vehicles, and doors to posters at airports and billboards on roadways.

Part IV: Finding Powerful Alternatives to Advertising

The Web is the new silver bullet for marketers, and this part shows you how to maximize its positive impact. It also helps you harness the power of publicity and get editorial exposure. Of course, you can’t forget about real-world interactions. Fortunately, special events provide you with a powerful alternative or supplement to ad campaigns and can bring you high-quality sales leads. Direct forms of marketing are also great alternatives, and this part has you covered here as well.

Part V: Selling Great Products to Anyone, Anytime, Anywhere

The classic marketing program has five components (the Five Ps), but much of what marketers do (and what’s covered in earlier parts) falls into the fourth P: promotion. In this part, I take you deeper into the other Ps: product design and branding, pricing and discounting to create incentives for purchase, the aggressive use of distribution strategies to place your product in front of consumers when and where they’re most likely to buy, and selling and servicing customers. I want to draw your attention to the all-important product and make sure yours is naturally brilliant enough to shine out and beckon customers to you. I also encourage you to examine your distribution, sales, and service, because these elements can make or break a marketing program (and a business).

Part VI: The Part of Tens

How can you boost sales without spending much money? What should you do to come through a downturn in your market or in the economy as a whole? Are there guerilla marketing techniques you could be using? The Part of Tens is great for answering these sorts of questions. This traditional part of any For Dummies book communicates brief but essential tips that don’t fit easily into the other parts. I recommend that you look at this part whenever you need insights or ideas because it encapsulates much of the essential philosophy and strategies of good marketing practice. Reading this part also helps you avoid common mistakes that await the unwary marketer.

Icons Used in This Book

Look for these symbols to help you find valuable stuff throughout the text:

All marketing is real-world marketing, but this icon means you can find an actual example of something that worked (or didn’t work) in the real world for another marketer.

When I want to get you up to speed on essential or critical information you need to know in order to succeed, I mark it with this icon.

This icon flags specific advice you can try out in your marketing program right away. And because sometimes you need the right perspective on a problem to reach success, this icon also points out suggestions on how to handle the task at hand in an easy manner.

You can easily run into trouble in marketing because so many mines are just waiting for you to step on them. That’s why I’ve marked them all with this symbol.

Where to Go from Here

If you read only one chapter in one business book this year, please make it Chapter 1 of this book. I’ve made this chapter stand alone as a powerful way to audit your marketing and upgrade or enhance the things that you do to make profitable sales. I’ve packed the rest of the book with good tips and techniques, and it all deserves attention. But whatever else you do or don’t get around to, read the first chapter with a pen and action-list at hand!

Perhaps you have a pressing need in one of the more specific areas covered in this book. If fixing your Web site is the top item on your to-do list, go to Chapter 10 first. If you need to increase the effectiveness of your sales force, try Chapter 17. Working on a letter to customers? Then Chapters 6 and 13 on marketing communications and direct mail can really help you out. Whatever you’re doing, I have a hunch that this book has a chapter or two to assist you. So don’t let me slow you down. Get going! It’s never too early (or too late) to do a little marketing.