What is Marketing?

Whole books and university courses have been dedicated to this subject, so we know that we won’t do it full justice in a short article.

But we want you to have a working knowledge that’s sufficient for your cricket-related business.

What we are about to reveal will enable you to use it as a planning tool, as well as a diagnostic tool.

We’ve literally spent thousands, of hours pondering over this and hope that we’ve come up with a practical, working definition that you can apply immediately to your cricket-related business.

You can also use it to analyse and solve any marketing problem you may have.

We know this is a bold statement, but try it and let us know if it works, or where it comes short.

If you want to go deeper into some of the concepts behind our definition, Seth Godin’s book, “This is Marketing” is an excellent place to start.

His views opened our eyes and gave us a new lens through which to view marketing.

But the simplified definition we will use comes from the training material of The Modern Marketing System (MMS), of which we are students.

Components Of Marketing

According to MMS, marketing at its core, consists of two components:

• An Audience
• An Offer

Get this right and everything works.

Get either wrong and everything is more difficult.

The Mass Media Mindset has us believing that getting in front of as many people as possible is the way to go.

But, if you are trying to sell beef steaks to a vegan audience, how many steaks will you sell?

Getting the audience right for what you want to sell is the cornerstone of successful modern digital marketing.

That’s why we, as a cricket-related business, focus on building and engaging with a cricket audience.

Before we get to numbers (I know it’s on your mind), we first have to look at the missing link.

Accurate but incomplete

The above definition is accurate, but not complete.

Even if you have the right audience and the right offer, sustaining their attention long enough to convert them into a customer is hard.

We need engaging content in the digital marketing world if we don’t want our voices to be drowned in a sea of noise.

All marketing comes down to three things:

• Getting attention (Awareness, Traffic)
• Sustaining Attention (Engagement, Leads, Prospects)
• Monetising Attention (Conversion, Sales)

Every business has to do this consistently throughout its lifetime.

For this to work, they have to work together as a system.

Systems Thinking

A system is a number of parts working together to achieve a common goal.

Each part is part of the system and can even be a system on its own, called a sub-system.

But none of the parts can achieve the common goal on their own.

For example, a car’s primary goal is to get you from point A to point B.

Remove its wheel nuts, and the wheels literally come off, rendering the car useless.

This is true of an old VW Beetle and a brand-new Porsche Cayenne.

We know that this is an oversimplification of systems theory, but it should give you a good picture of what a system is.

But to know whether a system is working effectively, you have to clearly define its goal.

Then you have to measure how effectively it achieves that goal.

In the creation of our goal, we started with the following statement by Peter Drucker, the great management guru:

“The purpose of a business is to create and retain a customer.”

Knowing this, so many businesses want to get as many customers as possible.

So they do so by any means.

But this is not us.

Goal Setting and Measurement

We eventually came up with the goal to create long-term happy customers.

This enables us to achieve our goal morally and ethically and still be successful.

We hope that you can resonate with it.

To do this, we must delight our customers and we must build relationships.

Our long-term sustainable growth and survival depends on this.

It can also be used as a yardstick to measure our success.

• Firstly, are we producing long-term happy customers? (System Goal)
• Secondly, how many are we producing? (System Output)
• Thirdly, at what rate are we producing them? (System Throughput)

This systems thinking framework can be applied to any business.

Once you’ve defined your goal, you first measure whether you are able to achieve your goal.

Then you can measure how well you are achieving that goal (Output and Throughput).

We’ve created the following diagram to visually represent our primary goal.

It can be used as a planning tool and a diagnostic tool.

Illustration and Application

This diagram is called a Kanizsa triangle.

It’s an optical illusion.

The triangle doesn’t exist.

It’s drawn by the mind based on the way the parts are arranged.

Take one part away and we no longer have long-term happy customers.

There are a few building blocks we need for us to set up a digital marketing system that produces the output we desire.

But more about that later.

We first need to understand the mindset needed to survive and thrive as a cricket-related business in South Africa.

What’s Next?

Your journey thus far has introduced you to the world of modern digital marketing for cricket-related businesses.

You have a practical understanding of what marketing is.

And you have an idea of the goals your marketing efforts must produce.

We are going to cover a marketing mindset next that could revolutionise the way you think about marketing.

It starts by showing you why you believe the way you do and opens the door to a new way of thinking.