In today’s day and time, where everybody is moving with their lives at the fastest pace, selling your product or idea can be tricky, having an entrepreneurs marketing guide can be the key. It can be challenging to attract attention from customers who are engrossed in their fast-paced lives. Hence, to reach out to the people of the 21st century, marketing is an essential tool for every entrepreneur. Your idea or product will just be yours if you don’t start sharing it with the world. However, not every entrepreneur is aware of how to go about marketing and where to start. Well, fear no more because I have found someone who was more than delighted to answer all your questions. 

Recently I did a podcast with marketing expert Tim Fitzpatrick, the founder and creator of Rialto Marketing. Tim has over 20 years of experience in business development and marketing. He spoke about Business Development and explained how entrepreneurs could build their marketing foundation using three fundamental principles. 

My first question to Tim was – “Why should people pay attention to marketing?”

He started by defining what marketing is. He said he liked to keep things simple. To him, marketing is getting someone who has a need or a problem that you can solve and for them to know, like, and trust you. Tim believes that the basis of marketing is to warm potential prospects up to what you do and to get them interested enough to buy your product or perform with your company. Tim was of the firm opinion that if you are not focused on marketing for your business, you could have the best product or service in the world, but it will not matter because you will have nobody to sell it to. He said he views marketing as an investment, while many business owners view marketing as an expense. 

My next question was about the three fundamental principles necessary to build a marketing foundation for entrepreneurs. He began answering this by quoting Michael Jordan, who said – “Get the fundamentals down, and the level of everything you do will rise.” Tim believes that if you get the marketing fundamentals right, it will be easy for you to build your foundation upon these fundamentals. 

Tim likes to call these three fundamentals the Marketing strategy trilogy, and they are:

1. Target Market – You have got to know who your ideal clients are, who you want to work with, who you do the best work with, and the most profitable customers that will refer you. You must know who you are trying to reach because you reach no one if you try to reach everyone. Tim does not recommend having over three different ideal client types, which becomes rather difficult to manage. Instead, he highly recommends interviewing the ideal client type to understand the values you bring to the table and what your customers expect from you. He suggests making a summary of how your clients got to know about you, what they like about you, and what they dislike about you. Tim believes that making this summary sheet will help you understand who your ideal clients are. 
2. Messaging or How you Communicate to your Market – This fundamentally creates clarity and engagement. Tim emphasized that messaging is what is going to make a company memorable and magnetic. He suggests that messaging should focus on what a company or business can do for the customer instead of communicating information about the business. Tim further shared that his company uses a storytelling framework created by a company called ‘Story Brand.‘ He stated that this framework positions your business or company as the guide and the customer as the hero. Tim also spoke about the Marketing Rule of 7 that says that it takes at least seven impressions for your brand or message to resonate with a prospect or customer. Hence, it will not sit well with a customer if you say seven different things seven times. 
3. System/ Plan to fall back on– A plan helps you identify when and what you will execute from a marketing perspective and gives you a framework that you can follow. Tim firmly believes that framework makes a plan easy to implement. He exclaims that without a plan in marketing, it is easy to get distracted. Tim shares how he likes to look at marketing plans as a 90-day sprint. This plan has six steps. The first step involves referring to the summary sheet that you create about your target market. The second step is to create an outcome-based goal that you want to gain in the next 90 days. The third step is to know your budget and understand the resources that you have. The next step is to know what you are currently doing with your marketing plan, which is followed by figuring out what you will do for the next 90 days. The 6th and final step is to understand what metric you will track to signify your business’s traction. 

Tim concluded this excellent session by stating that marketing is a Science and that there are no hard and fast rules about what will work for your business. Instead, every person needs to put their business or product out there by following a framework. Some things may work, and some strategies may not, but it’s all about putting your product or business out there. This brilliant conversation gave me some great marketing tips and inputs that I will surely use, and I hope this helps you. 

Check out the entire conversation. Tim was also generous enough to put together some resources for our audience that he thinks will help support our conversation.