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Key Marketing Skills
Background
Thriving organisations are continually considering ways that they can offer better services or products to their customers. One way they are responding to this challenge is through becoming more customer focused. Not only are the staff who come into contact with customers being trained about key marketing skills, but employees who have no external customer contact are being made aware of the fact that they have internal customers and are being taught the key principles of marketing to enable them offer their internal customers a better service.What surprises some people is that non-marketers are deliberately being taught marketing principles. This is a most commendable investment in training, particularly when involving the Marketing department in the design of such workshops since firms:
- gain more commitment from staff to new marketing initiatives;
- greater communication between marketing staff and other employees results;
- there is the opportunity for a better service or product through having a greater focus on customers.
How can we enhance your staff’s marketing skills?
We need to understand your firm’s strategy, the role different departments currently play in achieving this and the competencies staff currently have in satisfying customers’ needs. We can then design a programme which will train your staff about key marketing principles.
What sorts of topics would be covered?
The content of any workshop would be tailored to suit a firm’s needs, but some of the topics that could be covered include:
- Appreciating the role marketing makes to business success
- Marketing as a value adding process
- The importance of internal and external marketing
- Understanding the way that we must satisfy all stakeholder groups
- Reconceiving our services and products as benefits
- Why customer satisfaction is critically important and how to develop better services and products through regularly auditing satisfaction levels.
- Categorising our marketing resources and how to use these to better satisfy our customers
- How different orientations of the firm affect the enactment of marketing principles
- Understanding the three types of value disciplines and appreciating the need to excel on one of these
- Why firms are concerned about relationships rather than transactions and how marketing helps develop more effective relationships
- How we can better use our resources by segmenting markets then developing appropriate targeting strategies
- Understanding buying decision making processes to make our service or product more attractive
- What are the unique characteristics of services and how can we capitalise on these
- How can we augment our service or product?
- What is quality in either a service or product domain and how can we offer more quality?
- Appreciating the principles of marketing research to enable better informed decisions be made
- How we can take advantage of branding
- Developing a better product or service mix through tools such as Ansoff Matrix, gap analysis, product life cycles and portfolio management
- Taking a planned perspective to communicating with our customers
- Appreciating how to price a product or service
- Ensuring a coherent approach through having the skill to write a marketing plan
Is it appropriate to train staff about marketing principles?
Based on our experience and research the simple answer is "yes". We have done many assignments, for example regional electricity companies, a building firm, airlines, drinks manufacturers, a drug manufacturer and market research organisations. Staff can better appreciate how they can become more effective and informal feedback has indicated that there has been a positive effect in terms of the participants being able to add more value.
Arlington Associates, 43 Countess Close, Wimborne, Dorset, BH21 1UJ.
+44(0)1202 881 689