Entrepreneurial Marketing

Marketing is a management process for anticipating, identifying and satisfying customer requirements in a way that is profitable to an entrepreneur.it includes all efforts used to create, satisfy and retain the customer.

Entrepreneurial marketing is a unique set of marketing practices and methods used by entrepreneurs startups or small businesses to build and market sustainable businesses or help them to establish themselves in emerging markets.

Importance of marketing to entrepreneurial firms

To gain competitive advantage
To create awareness in the market
To increase and retain customer base
To enable firms to introduce new products and services in entrepreneurial firms
To build customer trust and credibility
To help the firm to achieve its objectives
Market research provides firms with important information for decision making
To help the entrepreneurial firm create customer references that are loyalty
To help facilitate market expansion

Factors that make entrepreneurial firms unique

Firms have limited resources and hence for them to expand they need to leverage their resources accordingly. They can do this by exploiting uncommon resources and also by complementing one resource with another to create greater value. They can also use someone’s resources to market their product.

The small size of the entrepreneurial firms.

This leads to a low market share and a lack of marketing power.

Stiff competition from larger established firms with all the resources

Being unknown to customers or potential customers.

This leads to a lack of trust in their abilities or offerings.

Entrepreneurial marketing dimensions

Proactiveness

Entrepreneurial firms need to be active by engaging in actions that might influence the firm’s environment to gain a competitive advantage.

Risk-taking

Entrepreneurial firms can be risk-taking by developing a new product and by finding ways of penetrating the new markets.

Innovation orientation

Firms need to be innovative by coming up with new products and services, distribution methods and new marketing methods.

Opportunity focus

Marketing needs to be opportunity-driven and so the entrepreneurial firms need to focus on opportunities like satisfying needs in the market.

Customer orientation

They should major on customer orientation so as to come up with creative approaches to customer creation.

Resource leveraging

Firms develop a creative capacity for resource leveraging and this comes in the form of the ability to recognize a resource that is not optimally being used or a resource that can be used in a non-standard way.

It can also be done by leasing, contracting and outsourcing.

Value creation

This involves the discovery of new sources of customer value and creating a unique combination of resources to create value.

It also refers to using existing resources in an unconventional manner to satisfy customer needs.

General Marketing

The Marketing Process

Market research

Market research is all about gathering market information about customers and their needs, trends, competitors, products, and services existing in the market.

Market research enables;

Identification of problems
Making of product mix decisions
Understanding customers
Decision making

Market analysis sets the base for the need to analyze your market to be able to understand trends, size of the market

Marketing strategy formulation

This helps to;

Satisfy customers in the selected market
Achieve objectives

The right marketing strategy should enable you;

To sell benefits either products or services profitable in a way that supports your objectives and it should fit in your capabilities as an entrepreneur.

The entrepreneur should make marketing mix decisions that will help them implement their strategy.

Marketing mix decisions

It is a combination of various variables that influence the demand or purchase of a given product or service. They are used by a firm to generate the desired response in a target market.

They include;

Products
Price
Place
Promotion
The value proposition of the product

Quality-this refers to meeting the basic standards.

Quantity-this refers to being enough to satisfy the needs of the customers.

Design of product

Ease of use

Safety

Durability

Reliability

Appearance

Branding

This basically is the trademark of the product that uniquely identifies it from the rest of the products and services in the market.

It should be distinctive and it should not violate other brands or be offensive in any way

Packaging

This is a communication tool for the product.

The packaging should be attractive and convenient.