SEMLEP Webinar – Marketing: Identifying the wants and needs of your customers

What will be covered ?

It will start with a quick discussion of what we mean by marketing – and, as well as learning that it is not the same thing as promotion, distinguishing it from related activities such as sales and branding.

The rest of the course is devoted to explaining how to draft a marketing plan following the CREATE/VALUE framework for Marketing, which sets out the:

• context in which your organisation is operating
• results you are seeking to achieve
• execution that this demands, in terms of strategy and tactics
• assignments both internal and external this requires
• tests to put in place as you work on the campaign
• evaluation at the end to learn lessons for the future.

New Markets

The course also explains how you can discover or create new markets for your business.

It looks at the popular Boston matrix to chart existing market share and market growth for each of your products, before turning to the Ansoff matrix to consider the pros and cons of shipping new products and/or entering new markets.

Before entering a new market, of course, it is essential to gauge demand. A fundamental concept is elasticity, which we can apply to price and income.

A more data centric approach is provided by HDDF: what has driven growth in the past and what is likely to drive it in the future? This enables us to forecast demand.

We end up by considering whether we should even try to create our own market, with an in depth look at Blue Ocean strategy.

Innovation

The course also considers the important subject of innovation.

We start by discussing the purpose of business: to create value for its customer. Yet customer satisfaction is also a function of expectations – and the problem is that the latter demand more and more over time. The solution to this ‘ratchet’ is continual innovation.

To explain why, we ask what innovation means – and reiterate that it is about the value we create for the customer, rather than our technologies or even our product.

The question is how we identify innovative bundles of value – and, to do this, we look at the innovation circle. We then explore how to manage the process through stage gates. The spotlight then shifts from supply to demand with a look at innovation models. How do new ways of creating value spread through a market? What is the hype cycle?

We end with the idea of disruptive innovation, contrasting it with sustaining innovations, and ask how we can avoid the “innovator’s dilemma’.

What will I learn?

• what marketing is (and is not)
• the difference between marketing, promotion, branding, and sales
• how to draft a compelling marketing campaign
• the best way to communicate with your customers
• how to discover or create new markets for your business
• the true meaning of innovation and its importance to your firm.

You can join our trainers, Justin and Francesca, every Tuesday from 0900-1000 for a ‘radio phone-in’. They’ll be happy to answer your questions about business, as well as offer hints and tips from their experience working with hundreds of SMEs. It’s a great way to start your day!

Phone in dates;

18th May

25th May

1st June

8th June

15th June

To join, please click here; https://live.digitalremit.com/semlep/index.html#phoneins 

Who should attend?

Any entrepreneur, director, or manager who needs to improve their marketing.

The course consists of pre-recorded material, which you can work through at your own pace, followed by a live two hour webinar to apply what you’ve learned to your own business.

There are also two advanced modules that look at (i) new markets and (ii) innovation.

This webinar will be held on Zoom. Information about joining the webinar will be sent through shortly after registration.

If you have any queries, please do not hesitate to contact samantha.hunter@semlep.com.