10 Marketing Must-Knows

1. What is marketing?

Marketing is a mix of solutions that create a maximum response to your product and services. Moreover, marketing is the life force that drives and sustains your business. It encompasses a set of tools and networks of strategies that motivate and inspire your clients and potential clients to engage in business with you. Marketing is not a mystery. It’s a precise, architected, well-thought-out plan that gives your business access, leverage, and support for your vision and goals.

2. Client engagement

Marketing will maximize your chance of succeeding in each step of your business model from introduction to sales, to winning bids, to resales, and to long-term sustainable business. It includes engaging in client relations programs like advertising, online social media strategies, client relations initiatives, and often community contribution activities.

3. Creating a unique proposition

Marketing serves to communicate your unique selling propositions. It includes ideas, solutions, and outcomes that are advantageous to your clients. Marketing illustrates your edge in the market, and it’s an opportunity to illustrate your experience, and the gain your clients will receive in buying from you or working with you. Marketing communicates a CLEAR advantage in real, tangible, descriptive, demonstrative terms, allowing your prospect to understand the details of your business offering in easy and quick ways.

4. Crafting client experience

Marketing includes analyzing and studying your business from the viewpoint of your client. It is the extracting of information that illustrates what’s new, unique, and creative about what you do, and bringing it forward for your clients to understand—in simple, easy terms. Your potential clients want to buy from you or work with you. It’s your job to communicate the “experience” they will have with you—in advance. Designing and communicating the experience that you leave clients with is key in their purchasing and decision-making process. Everyone wants to invest in a product or service that they know is going to fulfill their needs, that is reliable, that works, and is the solution they have been looking for.

5. Communicating extraordinary value

Explaining your processes, solutions, specifications, orientation, training, installations, craftsmanship, skill, standards, and safety considerations all provide dimensional advantage and inform clients of your superior advantage. Your job is to extract those processes and solutions, and present them in such a way that your potential client realizes “extraordinary value” and, therefore, automatically chooses to work with you or buy from you.

6. Marketing architecture

Great marketing comes from great business architecture. Marketing is by design. It starts with calling on all the unique propositions within your company, and then brainstorming all the different ways you may reach your clients powerfully. Taking the time to design your marketing strategies, choosing the ones that appeal to your clients, and engaging in marketing that is clever and fun are key.

7. Advertising works

Advertising is simply your way of communicating what you do. You can look at advertising as an extension of your conversations to reach people that you are not able to speak with one on one. Advertising takes many forms from billboard advertising, sponsoring events, speaking engagements, magazine advertising, radio and television sponsorships, online videos and banners, and much more. There’s an endless smorgasbord of advertising solutions out there. Your job is to find the advertising networks that specifically target your potential clients and communities.

8. Practical applications

Marketing strategies differ depending on your offerings in the market. Oil and gas companies market differently than major contractors. Oil and gas suppliers market differently than contractors. Industry associations market differently than industry support companies. Your position in the market determines how and where you market. Let’s take major oil and gas contractors and oil and gas suppliers as an example to illustrate some of the many ways that marketing success happens.

Major Oil and Gas Contractors

As a major oil and gas contractor, you may only have one client—the oil company. Marketing then becomes about client confidence and trust, client relations, client involvement, community contributions, supplier relations, investor confidence, and competitive advantages. Marketing can be specifically architected to include the following:

• Marketing to win the bid – what’s the unique proposition?
• Marketing to invoke trust – communicating your reliability, sincerity, competence.
• Marketing to illustrate credibility – how you deliver on time and on budget.
• Marketing to support deliverables – what your clients can expect to have, gain, and get.
• Marketing to community contribution – illustrating your involvement and support.
• Marketing to attract investors – competence, unique propositions, and trust.
• Marketing to illustrate the experience – clients want to know what it’s like to work with you in a way that is powerful, productive, results oriented, creative, efficient, and safe.

Oil and Gas Suppliers

As a supplier to the oil and gas industry, you may have many products to sell and many potential clients. In this scenario, marketing messages differ given the range of possible sales and clients. Marketing can be specifically architected to include these aspects:

• Marketing to gain sales – what’s your advantage, unique proposition?
• Marketing to invoke trust – communicating product reliability, solutions, and results.
• Marketing to illustrate credibility – client testimonials, product successes, and experience.
• Marketing to maintain your current client base – communicating why it’s worked so well for so long. Communicating what’s new and what’s coming. Communicating a long-lasting solid relationship.
• Marketing to attract new clients – introducing powerful solutions and strategies. Fulfilling needs. Communicating gainful experiences and results.

9. Compelling reason why

Business marketing works when it communicates the reason “why” potential clients want to work/buy from you. Clear and concise solutions, advances, innovations, and fulfillment of needs, wants, or desires must be clearly articulated, such that it calls people to action. Offering reasons “why,” gives the experience of “pull” rather than “push,” which is essential for people’s understanding and buying confidence.

10. Inform or educate in advance

Asking for a client’s business comes with a prior commitment to communicate, educate, elevate, and satisfy a buyer’s decision. Mastery in marketing means informing in advance! Answering why someone should buy from you or contract your service is your responsibility.