Marketing

Many people think that marketing is synonymous with advertising. The truth is advertising is only a small part; a single step in a never ending process.

The American Marketing Association defines marketing as:
"the process of planning and executing the conception, pricing, promotion and distribution of ideas, goods, and services to create exchanges that satisfy individual and organizational objectives."

This is obviously a very important part of planning your business. Therefore, in our seminars there are two weeks allocated for marketing, the 4 P's (product, price, place, promotion), target markets, SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, 0pportunities, threats) analysis, market potential, product life cycle, etc. All these things are crucial to knowing the environment your business is currently in and planning for "what if" scenario's.

In our seminar last night one of our speakers mentioned statcan.ca. This is a fantastic website to do some research on your market, its potential, and your place in it. There is another government website that I would like to direct your attention to; Industry Canada. It is a website with fantastic resources that goes more in depth about what we were talking about last night and what we will talk about next week.

Specifically, http://strategis.ic.gc.ca/epic/site/stco-levc.nsf/en/h_qw00016e.html talks about marketing if your still a little hazy. On the right hand side there is a link that takes you to an interactive worksheet that helps you to assess your strength in the market. One thing the government does is make pretty decent websites for the people needing more business information.

There is tons, literally tons, of information on marketing and examples of anything you may want about business plans, online. This wealth of information does come at a cost. Sometimes it is not a reputable site. Just be aware of this fact. Usually government websites are pretty reliable, so they are a great starting place.

Good luck marketing and I hope to see you next week.