Five levels of marketing

Opening a business is a scary, challenging, exciting adventure. On the birthday of our baby business, the hard part of marketing our business begins. Will customers come in? Will they come back? Will they love us enough to share with their friends? Will we have enough customers to buy our product to stay in business. The greatest gift a customer can give a business besides his money is sharing positive experiences with friends.

Marketing is a discipline most people don't understand. There are basically five phases to marketing that happen in the mindset of customers.

1. Awareness
2. Trial
3. Reminder
4. Loyalty
5. Sharing

The first step in marketing is awareness. If customers don't know you exist, you'll have a hard time surviving. If you spend more money on a high traffic location and attribute part of your rent to your marketing budget, you'll save in the long run making customer aware you exist. It's really important that you ramp up as quickly as possible in this step because time is money. And you probably sunk most of yours in your new idea. So the quicker customers start coming in, the better chance you have to survive.

Once customers are aware of your existence, you have to solicit trial. A customer that doesn't try your product will never know if you're any good. Trial comes from creating a compelling reason for a customer to stop in. Some discount. Some have giveaways. Others have a special grand opening that creates energy around the building pulling customers in. The trial step in building customers is where you'll find out if they like your product or not.

Most business owners think they've made it at the trial stage. A lot of customers coming in, checking out the offerings, maybe buying product. Sales are high. Spirits are high. Expectations are usually low from the customer perspective.

Once a customer has tried a product, there has to be a compelling reason to return. If the product doesn't fill a perceived need or if the company isn't perceived as superior to its competitors, the customer will probably not come back. Using reminder tactics as marketing can be very wasteful. Direct Mail is seen to be one of the best forms of offline marketing to a customer. Yet a 2% response rate is considered successful. The profit from the response usually doesn't pay for the marketing itself.

But if you do get return business and the reminders start working, you may be on your way to a loyal customer. A relationship with a loyal customer is a marriage. Once they become loyal, they see past the business's shortcoming. They accept and love the business for what it is.

When you can identify your loyal customers, your biggest return on marketing investment will be from them. The more they share stories and the more they refer you to their friends, the busier you will get. That's word of mouth. It happens by being awesome to a group of people. Be careful not to use your new loyal customers. You wouldn't want to lose that customer you worked so hard to get.