Marketing Informs and Sells

RCS Influencer Marty Stout says you must know who your ideal customers are before you begin marketing to them.  

Marketing is one of the most important aspects to any business. According to Wikipedia (not everything on Wikipedia is well founded, but) “the term marketing, is a derivation of the Latin word, mercatus meaning marketplace or merchant. We all want to sell our goods in our marketplace. For as long as people have bought and sold goods and services there has been a “marketplace” thus there has been marketing. Deluxe, the check printing company, has an interesting online article about marketing that gives 5 reasons why marketing is important. Two of them are “marketing informs” and “marketing sells” these may seem obvious but in simple terms we all MUST market to inform potential customers of what we do so that we can sell our service.  

The biggest question we must answer before we go to the marketplace with our product or service is to be sure we know WHO we want to sell to and make sure we are where they are. You will not sell very many snow shovels in Palm Springs in August even at a discount.  

Today everyone says that you must be in the first page of Google, or have a great Yelp rating, etc. That may or may not be true. You must know where your favorite kind of customer is when they are looking to buy your favorite kind of service to sell. Is your customer a homeowner, a business owner, an apartment owner? Do they have a roof that is flat, or pitched, do they have tile or slate or 30 year comp.? Do they own one roof or 100?  

The point is, identify your customer, find where they shop and market to them with all you have. Do not try to market to everyone, everywhere. You can spend a lot of money (think Super Bowl) with little result unless you target correctly.  But if you don’t go to the marketplace you cannot be a merchant, and we all need to sell.  

Marty Stout is the president of Go Roof Tune Up Inc. See his full bio here.