How can entrepreneurial marketing help you to reach your business goals?
Entrepreneurial marketing is a type of marketing that involves:
- business planning,
- market research,
- brand awareness,
- message development, and
- building and maintaining relationships with customers.
Entrepreneurial marketing can often be carried out on a low budget, which is ideal for many new business owners who may not have a lot of capital.
Business owners can use entrepreneurial marketing to help them establish their businesses and market their products or service.
Understanding how it can benefit your business will help you to build the right skills for entrepreneurs and put them to use in the best way.
Entrepreneurial marketing has been separated from traditional marketing.
Traditional marketing aims to influence revenue and measure marketing performance. It’s very data-focused and suitable for existing markets, as well as typically risk-averse.
In contrast, entrepreneurial marketing’s main objective is to develop a long-term competitive advantage using a creative and exploratory outlook. It’s suited to new, emerging, and fragmented markets, and it’s more tolerant to risk.
Entrepreneurial marketing is characterised by:
- being proactive in searching for new opportunities to achieve a competitive advantage and make a profit,
- innovation,
- focusing on the customer,
- risk management, and
- creating value.
All of these things can help you to reach your business goals.
Key Practices in Entrepreneurial Marketing
There are some key practices in entrepreneurial marketing that can help you to put the concept to good use.
Three types of marketing can be considered as fitting into entrepreneurial marketing:
- Low-cost marketing – marketing campaigns that don’t require much time or money and therefore help to generate larger profits
- Direct marketing – targeting specific individuals with customised ads
- Viral marketing – using the power of social media to get the attention of the audience and market a product or service
Some other types of marketing to consider in the context of entrepreneurial marketing include guerilla marketing, buzz marketing, growth hacking, and expeditionary marketing.
Examples of Entrepreneurial Marketing
Entrepreneurial marketing can include a range of different marketing methods. Some of the methods that you might use for entrepreneurial marketing include word of mouth marketing, events, publicity stunts, social media networking and promotion, and building a loyal community of customers by putting them first and increasing customer engagement.
If you want to use entrepreneurial marketing, you might employ methods such as email marketing, social media marketing, public relations, or direct marketing methods such as print ads.
The Benefits of Entrepreneurial Marketing
But what benefits can entrepreneurial marketing actually deliver to you as an entrepreneur? How can entrepreneurial marketing help you to achieve the goals that you have set for your business?
Entrepreneurial marketing has been shown to be effective in competitive markets. It can lead to improved outcomes for small businesses or for larger companies. It can also help you to learn valuable lessons about how to make the best use of various resources and insights into marketing that will benefit your business. Entrepreneurial marketing can often be low-cost too, which is great if you’re still getting your business up and running and you want to try out different marketing ideas.
Innovation
One of the principles of entrepreneurial marketing is that it focuses on being innovative and looking for new ways to give your business a competitive advantage. When you use an innovation-oriented approach to marketing, you look for ideas that will help you to find new markets, products, or methods. You should remain curious about how you can continue to discover new ways to make your business successful, whether it’s selling to a new group of people, using a new marketing method, or creating a new product or service that will appeal to your existing audience.
Using Existing Resources
This often means using scarce resources and low marketing budgets to achieve your goals. However, it’s not just about making use of what little you have. It’s also important to be creative and look for new ways to use resources or even gain access to new resources in smart ways. When you can make use of the resources available to you, it can allow you to take risks and be more innovative.
Create More Value
Traditional marketing often looks at customer relationships and the transactional nature of sales above all else. However, entrepreneurial marketing pushes you to create more value for the customer. If you can find new ways to create or define value, you can discover new opportunities to make money, grow a competitive advantage, and achieve success.
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Be Proactive
Being proactive is an important part of entrepreneurial marketing, and it’s one that can help you to decrease uncertainty and vulnerability. Proactiveness requires you to take action and create influence, rather than waiting for problems that you have to tackle. It should involve anticipating challenges and potential disasters and determining the actions that should be taken to address these problems.
If you want to get started on being proactive with marketing and growth, equip yourself with the right skills first. You need practical skills for entrepreneurs to achieve your goals.
Pursue Opportunities
Entrepreneurial marketing is opportunity-focused, requiring you to recognise and pursue new marketing opportunities and strategies at all times. It’s important to always be looking for opportunities that match the ability and the resources that your business has so that you can identify the best opportunity at all times. However, it’s also important to have the right market knowledge to be able to identify the best opportunities and make the right choices for your business.
Entrepreneurial marketing gives your business a different outlook that’s particularly suited to startups and new businesses. It helps you to approach the unique challenges that you will face in a more effective way.
How to Start Applying Entrepreneurial Marketing to Your Business
Entrepreneurial marketing can allow you to take a more innovative and responsive approach to marketing so that you can meet your goals. But how can you start using entrepreneurial marketing and make it work for your business?
To get started, you might want to use these principles found in ‘Entrepreneurial marketing strategy: lessons from the Red Queen‘:
- Use unconventional tactics
- Respond to changes quickly
- Improvise
- Make strategic alliances
- Grow demand
- Break boundaries
You can also follow this framework:
- Create opportunities – find an existing problem and create a solution for it that will produce results that you can measure
- Scale – connect with experts and insiders in the industry to build credibility, become more efficient, and improve the efficacy of your product
- Accelerate the process – get feedback for your products by ensuring that you quickly get them to the people they can benefit most so that you can start to make improvements
Making use of the resources that you have efficiently is one of the main things you need to do if you want to take an entrepreneurial approach to your marketing. This can mean making sure your resources go as far as possible, using them in ways others aren’t, combining resources, and using external resources.
There are lots of ways to put entrepreneurial marketing into action. The following should give you some ideas on how to implement entrepreneurial marketing in a way that benefits your business.
Relationship Marketing
You can use relationship marketing to create loyalty in customers you identify as being good candidates. This is achieved by offering products and services that have a competitive edge, as well as through transparency and giving your customer insight into how you operate as a brand and a business. As an entrepreneur, you can focus on creating long-term connections with your customers or clients, which can lead to greater lifetime value for each of them.
Thought Leadership
Being an industry expert can do a lot for your business. When you position yourself (or someone else in your company) as someone who really knows what they’re talking about, you can use it as a way to engage potential customers and draw people towards your brand and your products or services. However, promoting your products or services isn’t the primary aim.
The main thing that you should be doing is cultivating trust and a reputation as a reliable, helpful resource that is there for anyone looking for the right information. This type of marketing might involve steps such as developing a good tone of voice to connect with people, as well as publishing content through various channels or using social media to provide value. Developing your copywriting skills can be useful for this, and it would also be useful to build your knowledge of social media marketing.
As well as blogging and social media, you can use other content and marketing channels to market yourself as a voice of authority. Entrepreneurial skills such as creating webinars or writing and publishing ebooks can be very useful if you want to reach the right people.
Omnichannel Marketing
Using multiple marketing channels to promote your brand can allow you to carry out your entrepreneurial marketing approach. Covering channels such as social media, email, blogging and your website will help you to test out various digital marketing methods and grow your business.
These different channels can become difficult to juggle, so it’s important to choose them carefully to ensure you use the most valuable resources for your business’s needs. Limiting the number of marketing channels you use doesn’t have to hold you back. It can force you to use the entrepreneurial principles of making use of the resources you have and being innovative. Additionally, you can use marketing automation and various tools to save yourself time and money.
Brush up on your email marketing skills for one of the ways you can try out different marketing campaigns. Email marketing can allow you to test out different emails and find creative and innovative ways to reach out to your customers. Building a strong email list is one of the best things that you can do for your business as it grows.
Expeditionary Marketing
This type of marketing is all about identifying new markets by quickly developing and marketing new products. This method gives you lots of information and feedback, which you can then use to gain a competitive advantage. It allows you to rapidly discover new things about different markets and audiences.
Guerilla Marketing
Guerrilla marketing can be a way to do something different and generate publicity for your brand. Using unusual marketing campaigns, you can surprise people to create a memorable impression. It allows you to spread the word about your company at a low cost by bypassing traditional advertising. Of course, it’s not necessarily easy to get it right. Many brands have got guerrilla marketing campaigns badly wrong because they haven’t thought enough about how they might be received. While your tactics should grab people’s attention, they also need to create the right impression of your brand. Guerilla marketing can lead to earned press opportunities.
Buzz Marketing
Buzz marketing may be described as being similar to viral marketing and can even have some crossover with guerrilla marketing too. It’s all about generating word of mouth and excitement using events or sometimes publicity stunts to get people talking. It can get people to discuss your brand and your products or services both online and offline. Viral marketing is typically focused on online word of mouth, however, whereas buzz marketing might try to generate buzz in other spaces.
Growth Hacking
Growth hacking aims to find cost-effective ways to achieve growth through technology, analytics, and testing. Although mostly used in the context of SaaS (software-as-a-service) marketing, it can also be used in other industries and for a variety of different products and services.
Agile Marketing
By streamlining your marketing activities, you can quickly develop and carry out campaigns one after the other to continually learn new things about what works and what doesn’t. This is similar to the way you can use expeditionary marketing to develop and test out new products but applied to your marketing operations instead.
Entrepreneurial marketing can help you to achieve your business goals by combining entrepreneurship and marketing. Make sure you have the right hard business skills to innovate and be creative in your marketing first.
Learn more on the small business blog from Anthony Tedd .com
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