When should your marketing start?

Convincing the customer to use your product or service and making the customer form a long standing bond with it is the ultimate success point for a marketer. For this to happen your marketing should not start from the point when your product is ready. Your marketing should instead start even before you consider building a product.

For all we know, successful products or services are made to solve a customer problem. Once you have identified a problem and have felt a strong need for a solution, even before listening to your demanding sense of urgency and going ahead and building a product, you should initiate your marketing, i.e. the research.

Opportunity is not a lengthy visitor. Neither is opportunity the sole direction to your company or product.

The decision making of many entrepreneurs gets taken over by a strong urge to quickly make the product, sell it and make money. Instead of deeply analyzing the customer’s problem in all variations and judging to themselves if their solution is ‘the solution’ that meets customer’s needs, many companies simply get on with building the product and dump it on their sales team to somehow sell it. The above said behavior of companies is called ‘Marketing Myopia’, where short-sighted mindset and illusion of understanding the problem leads a way to business failure.

For easing out the problems of your future sales team and ensuring positive growth of your company, taking the plunge with complete understand of your market is the only way.

Below is a 7 Step research every entrepreneur should conduct before taking the plunge.

1.  Understand the problem (Problem Statement)
2. Who are facing the problem? (Know who are your customers)
3. How many of them are facing such a problem (Know the Market Size)
4. The solution required to solve the problem and its features (Define your Product/service)
5. Is there any pre-existent solution for the said problem already in the market (Market Scape)
6. If yes, how many such solutions are available? (Competitor Analysis)
7. How much cost would you incur in developing the solution for a customer and how will the customer pay? (Viability or Feasibility Study)