As you may have know, money rules the world, most of the time. People live with it. Everything that we need and want needs money, with the exception of some physical, physiological, mental, and psychological needs of course. But how can we expand our financial wealth? Does it happen instantly? Well, of course, when you have a strong family lineage who are either aristocrats or huge businessmen up to this day. But in reality, how can I make my money grow in a substantial amount and how would I work on it? Aside from learning basic accounting skills to keep track on your finances and whatnot, you need to study and build up your skills in marketing. The reason why you need to study marketing strategies is to prepare yourself on how to maneuver your business and ride with the tides of time. That may be a vague sentence right there but let's break it down. You need to learn marketing strategies in order to compete with trends, sell your products/services to a more profitable demographic, and forecast your business in the long run. I may have left out other important aspects of why marketing strategies are so important, but we'll just focus on these three things for now.
Compete with the trends
Now this doesn't always mean that copying or riding with the most popular thing going on (with a little bit of tweaking to avoid copyright issues, of course) is necessary to sell your service/product. You can always opt to innovate something that would supplement the ongoing trend, or simply create a brand new product to cater the needs of your targeted customers.
One example of this is how the PlayStation Portable dominated the portable gaming console market for a while then vanished. Back in the early 2000s, portable gaming consoles were either way too pixelated, or were just limited to a couple of games stored in cartridges or a embedded game on one device only. Their range of games that can be supported on each device were too limited, having a lack of variety (except of Super Mario, of course, 'cause that takes forever to finish). But when the PSP came out, everything changed. Multiple games can now be fitted in a smaller storage device without having the need to blow on cartridges or switching to another disc to play another game (except when you're a UMD user). Games were now enhanced visually, and their storylines and gameplay extended due to the wider range of capablities that a PSP can do. You can now browse the internet and play various media on one device. The PSP was ahead of its time. Within months of its initial release, the PSP stayed on top on the market for 2 years. Sony, the PSP's manufacturer, brought a pause to Nintendo's dominance on the portable console after more than a decade. Their flagship portable gaming consoles at the time, the Nintendo DS and the GameBoy, just lost their places in the ranking. But when you topple the largest competitor on the industry, nothing can go wrong, right? Wrong. Although the PSP stayed relatively on the charts in terms of popularity and sales, Nintendo has made its underway to resurface and claim its place again. They continued to upgrade their consoles to match the technology's specifications present at the time. Although PSP had also done several versions of the device itself with some tweaking of the size and its software specifications, it was nothing more but just something from the past when newer consoles were made by Nintendo such as the 3Ds and the DSi to compete with. As a result, productions of the product and their UMDs slowed down and eventually died out due to having the hardware not capable of supporting the games on its later years and developers not wanting anymore to develop new games for the device. Outside shipping of the product and its hardware ended in 2014 and producing UMDs have never seen the light of day when the last company to manufacture it closed in 2016. That ended the journey of the PSP. Despite that, Sony still continues to top the gaming industry with its PS4 and the worldwide anticipation of the PS5. I hope the readers will learn something from the success-to-failure tales of the PSP and will remind them that they should always continue to ride with the sails of time to keep their products/services relevant with their customers. Let's move on to the next one.
Selling your products/services to a more profitable demographic
As the one who owns and markets the business' products/services, you must know how your product/service would fit on your targeted demographic. You wouldn't sell women's underwear to a male military personnel, would you? (Unless if there's a crossdressing event that's upcoming in the army, or someone's bleeding too bad that your store has the only appropriate garments to stop the bleeding. But that's too unlikely to happen, or at the least, have a small chance from even happening.) If you're still not sure on who are your target customers, might as well ask these questions. Does my product/service really suit for this demographic? If this demographic fits well with the product/service, what motions should I make for this product/service to entice them to avail more? When you have successfully figured out answers to these questions, you might as well test the answers you have agreed on to see if this would really work. If it fails, you could always try again. Just always be sure to keep track on how much of your capital is spent after trying a couple of times to avoid bankruptcy. Once your products/services have found success in your targeted demographic, you can then start to make trends to appeal your targeted customers such as promotions, special deals, and so on. As you get more positive reviews from this demographic, you can rely on them to do the marketing for you, but not to the point where your business is not promoting the product/service, because getting too complacent and contented with your business for a long time will always yield bad results. A bonus business tip: When promoting your business, try to get the customer thinking that you're about to give them quality services/products rather than being downright chasing for their wallet. Being blunt is good 'cause the truth would be revealed, but at some point you need to sugarcoat some of it on the customer's end to achieve the ideal results for your business. Moving on to the next topic, here we go.
Forecast your business in the long run
Planning your business isn't going to be always selling and making a dime out of it. In order to sustain your business, you need to learn how to forecast the outcome of the actions that would take a serious turn for your business. Although Mathematics is necessary for this concept, you don't always need to worry about it (unless you plan to make a business in engineering and you're the one dealing with all the math) since accountancy only is a fraction of the whole business process. If you absolutely hate math, it's gonna be a take-it-or-leave-it scenario for you because businesses, like all other aspects of the world, needs Math. By forecasting your business, you will always need graphs and other numerical and visual representations to outline where your business is supposed to head to in a specified period of time. I'm still not an expert on this especially on the specifics on forecasting businesses using empirical data, so I'm not going to talk much about it.
If you're wondering why my previous statement contradicts the other two topics I have discussed earlier, it's because it's made up of stories from other sources, and that does not mean I'm an expert in starting up and dealing with businesses, nor do you have to rely on these three topics mentioned because you still need to learn a lot in marketing, and so do I. Let me just rephrase that everything that I have mentioned above are just tips, and are not the only factors to rely on to have a successful and sustainable business. I hope this article helps.
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