In order to successfully market your company, you have to make sure that your company is marketable. You have to have something to market and that is the entire customer experience not just the product. Yes, you can have a great product but if you don’t treat your customers right when they are buying that product they will go somewhere else.

What good is it to have the best product on the market if your customers hate dealing with you so much that they will not buy it from you? The original Apple M3 player, the original IPod, was not the best on the or the first player on the market, but it was the easiest to use and Apple was the easiest company to deal with, not to mention, probably the most fun.

Thinking about marketing, and making yourself an attractive company to your customers and would be customers, here are ten things that will help you develop and implement the best marketing plan in your industry:

1. Make sure you are customer focused. Business is not about you it’s about your customers. Always work at figuring out their needs and then meeting or exceeding those needs.
2. Digging deeper, define exactly who your target customers are and what it will take to win them, develop an ideal customer plan.
3. Check out what your competitors are doing. The best place to find what is going on in your marketplace is to monitor what your competitors are doing. You don’t have to imitate them but you can study them in terms of what is working and what is not. This is a also a good time to discover what solutions are not being provided and provide them.
4. Marketing is all about planning., You have to plan for the future, not just today, but next week and the month after that and the year after that. You should develop an ongoing live marketing plan and live with it every day, making adjustments, as needed.
5. Make sure that all of your company’s policies are customer friendly. Go over them and make sure that in all cases they are not offensive to your customers.
6. Develop your company’s story and make sure that not only everyone in your company knows it but that everyone in your market knows it as well.
7. From this story develop your brand and from your brand develop your advertising.
8. Pay attention to your advertising, yes I know you think you do but most of the time all you’re really doing is talking about how much you spend on advertising. Let me give you a hint, whatever you are spending on advertising is not enough, you should be spending more. If you truly intend to be the leading company in your industry then you have to make sure that everyone in that industry knows what you do and why you are the best at it.
9. Always be selling and always be marketing. Without customers, you will have no sales and without sales you will have no company. That is all there is to it. You can buy all the equipment you want, you can have all the technology you think you need but what good are those things if you don’t have any customers?
10. Use any tool you can to help your sales and marketing team. This includes social media, value content newsletters, lunch and learns, seminars and webinars and whatever other new thing comes down the road. Do anything, learn anything, buy anything that will give you an edge over your competition when it comes to getting your name out there.

And one more, always under promise and over deliver. Make sure that everyone in your company is on board with your marketing effort. That everyone knows and respects your customers and considers the customer in everything they do. Empower your customer service people to be on the customers’ side. Give them some latitude to make the right decisions when they are dealing with customer issues. In short, have everyone ready to put the customer first at all times.

Great marketing, great customer service and great sales service are all key ingredients in developing and sustaining a great customer focused company. Pay attention to this and make sure you are always purposely driven in your sales and marketing efforts, and in the end, you will have an industry leading company.

It’s only common sense.