The Foundations of Marketing: 3 Crucial Steps to Guarantee Success Long-Term

The difference between businesses that thrive and businesses that struggle to cut through the noise are solid marketing foundations.

But how are marketing foundations defined? And how do those foundations look across different industries, varying products or services, in varying company sizes?

Of course, there is no one size fits all solution to establishing a long-term successful marketing strategy. However, there are a handful of universal marketing foundations that, regardless of industry, product, company size, market size, can be the difference-maker in how successful your marketing efforts are long-term. 

Step #1: Defining the “who.”

It’s crucial to clearly define why your brand exists, and what problem(s) it solves for your intended target audience. But before you can answer questions about brand purpose and how the product is not just something to buy, but a solution to a problem, your brand needs to have a sense of self. 

Companies don’t start out of thin air. Most often, people identify a problem that doesn’t have a clear solution or a problem where the solution can be improved upon, and the idea for a new business is born. When this happens, it’s pivotal to extract vital founder information about the product or service so that their vision can be translated into usable marketing foundations. 

Defining who you are starts internally. To effectively define the “who” internally, here are a few questions that need to be answered:

• What are the defining characteristics your brand stands on, and for? 
• What are your core values as a company? 
• How is your product or service helpful to your intended target audience? 
• What do you commit to doing for your customer? What’s your mission? 

A huge mistake companies make is skipping this step entirely. Founders or founding teams feel confident in an idea for a product or service, see a potential gap in the market, and hyperfixate on how to look attractive to potential customers. But without knowing the brands’ core values, mission, and defining characteristics, founders and founding teams struggle to develop a narrative. This ultimately leads to a weak brand story, making it infinitely more difficult to resonate with potential customers, business partners, and investors. 

Step #2: Developing your story. 

After defining the “who” internally, the next step is telling the story behind your brand. Especially in a highly competitive market, the only unique aspect of your brand is your story — the “why” behind your business. Without defining your narrative, your business is nothing more than product or service. 

The companies that struggle most with developing the brand narrative usually have their priorities out of place. First and foremost, developing the story is an internal process. There should be virtually no reliance on outside factors during this stage, aside from the reason behind your intention for creating a solution to an existing problem. Beyond that, your story should be rooted in your defining characteristics and brand values — not in why you’re better than potential competitors. 

Here are a few questions to help nail down your brand story:

• Who’s your founder, and what motivated them to get into space? 
• What are the features of your product or service versus the benefits? 
  • Name the benefits that resonate with people 
    • I.e. A lightbulb has 1k lumens vs. the lightbulb helps you see at night
    • Benefits drive your brand story — how people relate to the brand 
• What promise are you making to your customer(s)?

It’s important to note that your brand story goes beyond sharing the “why” behind your company, and includes identifying the brand voice, tone, image, and more.The different sized variations of your brand narrative/story, and a starter pack of ad copy, headlines, and a landing page talking to your target audience, including brand voice and tone guidelines

Even if you pivot, that shouldn’t affect your story. If you pivot constantly, you probably need to re-evaluate your who/why

If you can’t articulate your story that’s a sign you should head back to the drawing board

Step #3: Identifying your target audience. 

After defining the ‘who’ and ‘why’ behind your brand, you need to identify your target audience. This is an extremely detailed step in the marketing foundations process. 

As we all know, your target audience is much more than the Total Available Market (TAM) — the total number of people who would potentially buy your product or service. The segment of TAM that you’re actually capable of servicing is your Serviceable Available Market (SAM). Your SAM is often times defined by location — it’s the maximum amount of customers you can serve after identifying restrictions of TAM (i.e., selling products internationally). Your Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM) is the segmented portion of SAM you can capture right now, after accounting for competition. 

In general, TAM is a good way to measure long-term growth potential, while SOM is a way to measure short-term profitability. For instance, a company’s TAM might be upwards of $10 billion, but their SAM is $100 million, and SOM $10 million. After understanding your SOM, it’s time to dig deeper by personifying potential buyers within your SOM to identify exactly how your product or service is the right solution for their problem. 

Personification is identifying as much about your customer as possible — everything from where they live to what they typically do on a weekend in July. The more you can learn about your target’s behavior, the better you’ll be able to tailor your messaging, and position your product or service as the ultimate solution to their problems. To really set yourself up for success during the personification process, give your customer a story. For instance, while researching your SOM you might find that a majority of your SOM is women between 30 and 45, and typically live in large cities. So, come up with a few different “characters” by personifying that target. Give them a name, occupation, career. List out potential hobbies, what they do on the weekends, if they drive or take public transportation. Use free tools like Google Analytics to build a “whole” character or even send out surveys in exchange for a discount or free product to get to know your SOM better. 

Remember, your target audience is a group of people looking for a solution to their problem that you’re actually able to serve right now. The more you dive into the demographics and psychographics of your target audience, the stronger your overall foundation will be in regard to marketing. 

The cornerstone of strong marketing foundations is introspection as to who you are as a company and the mission behind your product or service, along with a deep understanding of the audience you’re able to serve. 

Without clearly defined marketing foundations, you will undoubtedly struggle to move customers down the customer lifecycle and succeed long term. Luckily, there are a number of ways to put building your marketing foundations to practice. 

Here’s a brief exercise you can practice to ensure strong marketing foundations, regardless of industry: 

Questions for defining the ‘Who’: 

• Who do you sell to
• Who are the audiences 
  • List out everything you know about them / want to know about them

Questions for defining the ‘What’: 

• What are the features of your product / service? List them out. 
• What are the benefits of each feature? List them out. 

Questions for defining the ‘Why’:

• By taking your most impactful benefits, write out three promises that you’re making to your target customers