Episode 135: Four Principles of Marketing for Small Business Owners
In this quick tip episode, Fiona gives a short summary of what the four principles of marketing (Brian Tracy) are. From specialization to concentration, find out what they are and find out how you can learn more about marketing for your small business.
Topics discussed in this episode:
Introduction
4 Principles of Marketing
#1 Specialization
#2 Differentiation
#3 Segmentation
#4 Concentration
Conclusion
Get in touch with My Daily Business Coach
Resources Mention
Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time by Brian Tracy
Building a StoryBrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen by Donald Miller
Episode transcript:
Hello, and welcome to Episode 135 of the My Daily Business Coach podcast. My name is Fiona Killackey. I'm the host of this podcast. And in addition to that, I'm an author, if you haven't checked out my book, passion, purpose, profit, go and check it out. It has helped so many people, I know that because they get in touch with me, thank you.
And if you listen to this, and you're sort of like, "Oh, I'd love to work with Fiona or see what else she has available". Go on over to mydailybusinesscoach.com/shop. And you can find everything from 1:1 business coaching through to ebooks, and kind of 90-day content plans and all sorts of things including a whole bunch of free things as well. But I wanted to say thank you, thank you for choosing to spend your time with me, I know that time is such a precious thing no matter where you are in the world. I'm in Melbourne, we are still in a lockdown. We have no school, no childcare, it's really fun. Hence I'm recording this whilst looking out into beautiful gum trees. With that beautiful sun that comes in at the end of the day. It's my favorite kind of sun, just when you know, it's just about to start getting dark. And I'm doing that because I, like everyone else's, have to shift and move and kind of juggle everything in. So I'm getting these podcasts in where I can. So thank you so much for listening, it just makes all this sort of work of putting these together really, really worth it.
So today it is a quick tip episode. And before I jump into this, which is a tool that you may not have heard of that is super useful. I wanted to acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians on the land on which I'm lucky enough to live. They are the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation, and I pay my respects to their Elders past, present and emerging and pledged to work in ways that aid in true equality and access for all. So today, it is a quick tip episode. And this one is really important if you are working on your marketing, and actually I pulled this from my Marketing For Your Small Business course, which I'm currently going through with an amazing group of small business owners. So we're doing the course and coaching nine week program together. And I thought about this and just thought you know what, this would be a really good tool to include in my podcast. So let's get stuck into it.
So, the tool, I guess is like a framework or is a framework, not like a framework, and I can kind of see my dad in my ear. Like stop saying like, it is a framework. Thanks, Frank Killackey. And this framework actually comes from Brian Tracy. So if you haven't read, Eat That Frog!, which is a really great business book all about kind of doing the most ugly, hard things in your business first each day, so that you feel really productive. I think he's done heaps of other books. But he came up with this concept, or that's where I first learned about it. And I think I watched a video, gosh, back in 2015, when I was planning my business, and I was just sort of watching different things that people had put out. And I came across this and thought it's really, really useful. And so what it is, is the four principles of marketing as defined by Brian Tracy.
The four principles of marketing are sort of, you know, four, I guess you would say steps or four sort of stages to work through when it comes to marketing your business. Now, the first is specialization.
#1 Specialization
#2 Differentiation
#3 Segmentation
#4 Concentration
So if you are listening to this while walking, you're out you're doing something else cooking. All good. You can find the transcript for this over at my daily business coach.com forward slash podcast forward slash 135. And if you're not doing something else, and you can actually write it down, I'll just repeat those four. Again, it's specialization, differentiation, segmentation and concentration. So what do they mean? Obviously, this is a quick tip episode.
So I'm going to be quick and brief.
#1 Specialization
What do you specialize in? You know You can't do everything Donald Miller who wrote Story Brand always says, you know, if you confuse you lose, so you can't be everything to every person. And this isn't necessarily about super, super niching down, but it's about knowing what do you do? Like what is your area of specialization. So say for instance, in business coaching, and there are a million of us, there may be people who specialize more in spiritual business coaching, there may be people who specialize in Kinesiology and business coaching, or Reiki or kind of physical healing, there may be people who specialize in financials and business coaching. So accountants and other people who've moved into it, then there may be people like me that really specialize in content and systems and marketing, and business coaching.
And so, firstly, understanding, you know, what does your business specialize in? So you can't be, you know, doing 101 different things. So what does your business specialize in, and might be helpful to just literally write these four things down, and then start working through them through these kind of questions that I'm asking you.
#2 Differentiation
So for any business to succeed, it kind of needs to have, well, it does need to have points of differentiation that make it different. And and this is really important, better than a competitive product or service. So again, if I was somebody who really wanted to work with a business coach, and predominantly want to set up systems and processes, but also really wanted to understand my brand, and create amazing marketing, then I will work with someone like me, who has that that background, and a really robust background in brand marketing content systems. If I wanted to say work with someone who, you know, maybe I'm really scaling up, and I'm going to be, you know, having a call center with like 3000 people in it, then I might want to be working with someone who comes from a HR background. So that is how that person may be better or different. So you want to be thinking about, in your experience in your career today, in everything that you bring into your business and your staff bring into your business, how are you different, and how are you better than a competitor product or service.
So let's say for example, you are in the fitness space. And let's say you work with people who let's say want to lose weight, let's just make an easy one. One thing that might be better about you than your competitor might be that you used to be overweight. So you can really understand the process that people have to go through, you've been there, you haven't been someone who's been fitting slim, and trim all their life. Or alternatively, maybe you're a psychologist who is also comes from a particular background of say, you're a high school teacher, and then you moved into becoming a psychologist. And so you work with teens, and you also really understand the school system, because you are different and potentially better than a psychologist who has never been in the school system and is now working with teens that have maybe issues about behavioral to do with school. So you want to be thinking about that. Number two, which is differentiation.
#3 Segmentation
This is where you're sort of niching down, really. So it's really you know, who do your products or services or both serve who is most likely to get something from them whose lives are going to change as a result of your products or services. And then within that do you have kind of customer segments within your overall customer base. So you might have customer segments that are great for return on investment, you might have customer segments that are really great for brand awareness, you may have customer segments that both which is amazing when you can get those ones, but you want to think about who is my audience and then within that can I kind of niche down and niche down and niche down, and then how you market to meet those needs. And I always say to people, you know, market with emotional drivers and rational drivers because we buy from emotion. And you want to be looking at the needs of your customers and the customers within that segment that you've identified, and then be talking to those needs within your marketing. So that's number three segmentation, who do your products and services most serve.
#4 Concentration
So it's really getting concentrated like who we're going to go after first. So once you've applied number one, which is specialization, you know what your business does, and specializes in number two, you know how you're different which is differentiation. Number three, you understand your segmentation. Number four is concentration. So once you've applied those other three areas, to what it is you sell, then you need to kind of focus your time and your money and your energy into customers who are most likely to transact with you soonest.
So you've identified what do we do? How are we different and how we better who needs us? And then within that, how can we take this one message that we've identified from mapping those three things out and hone it in concentrated to the person who most needs it or the brands who most needed if you're B2B.
So that is the four principles of marketing. Just a quick kind of overview of it, it is a great tool for you to think about when it comes to your marketing. And if you want to uncover more of that, you can, of course, just google the four principles of marketing, Brian Tracy, and if you want to understand more in marketing in general, I mean, this is one tiny snippet from my course Marketing For Your Small Business, which you can find anytime available at Marketing For Your Small Business.com and then a few times a year, we do run the course and coaching program so you get nine weeks of live coaching with me. So that is it for today's quick tip episode. As I said before, we do include a transcript of the show notes over at my daily business coach.com forward slash podcast forward slash 135. If you took something from this, I would absolutely love it. If you could share it with a friend share it on social media, make sure you tag at my dog business coach so we don't miss it. And please hit subscribe so you don't miss out on any of our other quick tip episodes or longer coaching episodes and my interviews with small business owners from across the globe. Thanks so much for listening. See you next time. Bye.
Thanks for listening to the My Daily Business Coach podcast. If you want to get in touch you can do that at mydailybusinesscoach.com or hit me up on Instagram at @mydailybusinesscoach.
