The Power of Marketing

By Soko Directory Team / Published January 25, 2016 | 9:30 am

Nobody establishes a business to make losses. All business are established with an aim to make profits. To effectively capture these profits one has to have a strong market. Markets are grounds upon which profit margins are captured. In the world of business, there is no what we call a general market. You cannot succeed much simply by creating products and services for the general market. Many have succeeded that way any and many have failed too. The best form of understanding your business is to accept the fact that markets are segmented. These segments are formed in a manner that is determined by the business itself, the proximity to the raw materials, the customers and the ease to access the market.

In every business, there are what we call market forces. Market forces often result in tremendous shifts as well as dynamics that hit business and only the mighty and well-founded businesses are the one that often remain standing. There is, therefore, a dire need to understand and comprehend the marketing strategy so as to equip ourselves as well as our teams with the best knowledge on the marketing world as well as having the strength and power to sustain the profitability of any given business.

You may have customers who are loyal to you but there comes a time when those customers will leave without a word and most of the time, they leave when you need them the most. Some business analysts say that when customers leave or unsubscribe from your products or services, you are likely to only get feedback from three or four percent of them. This implies that the remaining 97 or 96 percent of your dissatisfied customers go away without any feedback. What is more worse is that more than 89 percent of those customers who stop subscribing to your products or services will never come back to you to explain why they left.

There is a simple phrase that says that customer is the king and that a customer is always right and this shows how important a customer is to a business. A customer can make your business or your company thrive, stall or collapse. There is, therefore, the need to treasure and strive to sustain a customer. What you have to understand is that when a customer leaves dissatisfied, he or she will tell a friend who will in turn tell a friend and what you will have is a mass exodus of customers from your company, business products or services.

How well do you handle problems especially issues of negativity in your company or business? It is said that how well you handle and solve problems that result on the negativity of your business, close to seven out of ten of your dissatisfied customers are likely to come back. You will spend more in search of a new client than what you would have spent on maintain the existing customer or client. It is, therefore, prudent to strive in maintaining the existing client or customer than specializing in losing them and looking for new ones.

For you to capture and maintain your customers, make sure that your business or company is majorly customer oriented and not product or territory oriented. Know how valuable your customer is. Let your customer come first. If your customer is satisfied, your business will always sail and if the customer is dissatisfied, then your business is prone to fail. Remember that the main reason why you set up that business was to satisfy your customers. The end user of your products and services is your customer and that is how valuable your customer is.

The best way is to know which among your customer is the most profitable. If possible, rank your clients or customers according to their profitability to your company. Let us say you have 200 customers. Out of those 200 customers, how many bring the most value to your business. Calculate your profits and see where the lion’s share comes from. If say for instance, 70 percent of your profits came from 50 customers out of the total 200, then it is imperative that you strive to maintain and satisfy the 50 customers even more. To do this, you must always make sure that your products/services are tailored towards making sure that every single customer is satisfied. Only that way, will you be able to keep your customers, giving them no reason to switch loyalty. Your focus should be to satisfy every individual customer.

It is said that the loyalty of the customer is directly proportional to the kind of staff as well as the training that your staff has. Your staff has to be equipped with the knowledge as well as with the understanding of handling your customers and on how to manage bring in new customers. Your staff should be made to understand how important a customer is to the company and to them especially concerning their remuneration.

Make your business known. This is where advertisement comes in. Remember, establishing a business and not making it known is like winking at a girl in total darkness.

Article by Juma Fred.

About Soko Directory Team

Soko Directory is a Financial and Markets digital portal that tracks brands, listed firms on the NSE, SMEs and trend setters in the markets eco-system.Find us on Facebook: facebook.com/SokoDirectory and on Twitter: twitter.com/SokoDirectory

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