FE770: Business End of the Dog: Marketing for Pet Professionals

Week 1, Lecture 1: What is Marketing?

There’s an S-word that I’ve found most small business owners think of as a dirty word… they cringe when they’re asked to do it and they avoid talking about it any more than they have to.

But in this class, we’re going to get it right out there in the open.

What word am I talking about?

Sales.

While not every marketer on the planet will agree with me, I think marketing and sales should be very closely tied together. If your marketing isn’t eventually helping you make money, I think it’s probably not marketing worth doing.

So we’ll be talking a lot in this class about how the marketing techniques we discuss tie back to getting you more customers or clients, what you’re selling those dog owners, and how to tell whether or not things are working.

Most of you probably fall into 1 of 3 categories:

1. You’re new to dog training or marketing and aren’t sure where to start.

2. You’ve been doing this a while, but are struggling to get enough business or aren’t really sure your marketing efforts are doing anything.

3. You’re successful, and know your parts of your marketing work (because you have more than enough clients!) but you don’t know which parts and are looking to drill down into it so you can spend less time on marketing activities overall.

Regardless of which situation fits you best, my goal in this class is to help you develop a plan to move forward — and give you the confidence to work through that plan and keep with it even after this class has ended.

So, let’s get to the heart of the matter. What is Marketing?

Marketing is the process by which we can take someone who has never heard of you or your business before and get them ready to buy.

Google defines it a little differently, but has a similar idea: the action or business of promoting and selling products or services, including market research and advertising.

I like my definition better, of course. Why? Because the word process implies that marketing is about getting someone to take steps toward the end goal of buying a product or service.

In fact, there are three basic steps we need to think about.

Step one: You need to take people who have never heard of your business before and make them aware it (and you!) exist.

Step two: If you’ve ever had a friend recommend a product to you and then thought to yourself later, “Now what was the name of that again?” you’ll understand why this second step is important. This step is about getting those potential client’s names and some sort of contact information, so you can begin to build a relationship with them.

Step three: Finally, in comes that S-word. Once you’ve had a chance to build up some trust, it’s time to sell them something. In marketing, that’s often called a “conversion.”

Homework Assignment 1:  I want you to take and list out all of the things (or anything) you do for marketing now, and then think about where each of those things might fit into these three stages. If you’re brand new, and aren’t doing any marketing yet, I want you to list out marketing ideas and what step you think those ideas might fit into.