Marketing Up

The following are some key areas that one must consider upon devising an effective marketing plan:

Where to compete?

A company will more or less define its market by the products it offers. A shoe store for instance can offer an extensive collection of shoes from low prices to premium prices thus targeting a wider audience. Nonetheless, another business owner can decide to go into a narrower niche and sell only premium brands, thus targeting a small and specific audience in the market.

What is your value proposition?

Creating a business that seems to be offering or possess nothing new or is very similar to its competition is likely to face many challenging times ahead. The business needs to attract new customers while maintaining existing ones, preferably building a solid base of loyal clientele. A business’s success in its value proposition is marked when new and existing clients start considering your business as a substitute from amongst your competitors. The strategy of a supermarket can be to offer a wide range of products, well known brands as well as their own brands.  Another option could be to offer a smaller range of products but with much cheaper prices, so customers shop for a bargain.

What are your assets and competencies?

Assets are resources that perform well when compared against competitors. For instance, a restaurant may have a wood and stone oven that can be great to cook pizzas. Thinking ahead is crucial so the company can differentiate and stand out from competition. A business also needs to have competencies, these being those areas that the business excels at doing.  To keep it on the same lines, a restaurant may have a good and fast service which would be ideal to serve a healthy lunch. These assets and competencies must be aligned with the core business strategy to help sustain a competitive advantage.  Lacking the above assets may reduce competitiveness while they can also be overwhelming and reduce profits.

Understanding your customers

Dividing the market into segments will help create different groups and analyse them separately. This will be worthwhile since it will affect the business core strategy while also changing or discovering the value proposition. The groups could consist of the market demographics such as the age, the locality and the neighbourhood as well as their lifestyle. One can also assess the customer by researching for what they are looking for and what are their current unmet needs from the market.


The above points are just some of the basics that would be worth considering prior on setting up your business. Depending on the industry and where the business competes affects the complexity of a marketing plan. More areas need to be considered, such as the market itself, the environment the business will be operating in, how to continue to sustain leverage against competitors, as well as what strategies and programmes will be undertaken to achieve the business objectives.


Conrad Bugeja is a Search Engine Optimisation Consultant and Pay-Per-Click Consultant at Alert eBusiness Internet Marketing Division - www.alertemarketing.com