Starting a small business is daunting challenge in itself. Taking steps to understanding marketing to develop a marketing strategy is critical to getting your business focused in the right direction to build, grow, promote and increase sales with your ideal audience.

A very energetic and enthusiastic presenter Amber Raney-Kincade delivered the session. JCI members were involved in an interactive seminar which covered the insights into the marketing funnel and the loyalty loop. What clearly became apparent was marketing applies areas of business psychology and peoples' behaviours which influence their buying decisions habits and lifestyle.

I have recently launched an exciting start-up business that identifies, develops and distributes innovative products to deliver to the UK market. The session was relevant to me as under my portfolio we have introduced an innovative tea concept not seen in the UK that is an alternative to the messy tea bags (http://bitly.com/puMs82) and soon to launch a platform for building gap analysis, it delivers strategic results that allow you to prioritise and move forward (http://bit.ly/qa345b).

Having the right marketing mix with your targeted audience will be pivotal to engagement and exposure. I personally have a business background through my business degree and previous career as a management consultant, I only applied the four Ps of the marketing mix:

Identifying who your business stakeholders and their demographic will help define who is the audience you need to target, their environment, interests and groups which will help shape your ideal customer. Mapping out the customer journey is useful technique which my team I have focused on with the Royal T-Sticks targeting, not limited to, hospitality/office sector and with Spidergap with consultants in consultancies, research organisations and human resource departments.

This made me think of developing use case scenario examples of my ideal customers. These scenarios would help bring to life your audience you will need to communicate with through your now defined marketing mix.  Using social media strategies to engage build rapport with your audience was an area Amber honed in on, using not just USP (unique selling points) but also ESP (emotional selling point). Communicate with your audience through blogs, Facebook, Twitter, website, newsletters.

There are many marketing definitions out there, one I noted "the aim of  marketing is to know and understand your customer so well the product or service fits him/her and sells itself." - Drucker

To permeate all areas through the marketing mix is important, more critical is timing of the communications, which the analogy used, is a bit like the recipe for preparing and serving Christmas Dinner which should come out in the right order and prioritised correctly. This would not work if the brussel spouts came out before the main meal, marketing communication is similar!

Great anecdotes and real life examples brought the theory to life and covered basic concepts to more insightful examples of marketing genius with Nintendo Wii and not so great marketing campaigns with TRiiBE drink launch.

Everyone took away some general and practical advice away on the worksheet handout, I was happily picked on as my current situation is very real in the process. I was targeting my audience through trade shows and industry organisations including the London Olympics Committee buyers. There are other channels I need to consider to reach out to the ideal customer. The session was overall both entertaining and informative to stimulate further thinking and action of getting marketing right first time.

By Ricky Kothari, JCI London Member