Market Your Way to the Top

Elizabeth Wilson of Entrepreneur.com



Entrepreneur.com expert columnist and marketing guru Mark Stevens addresses the most common marketing questions and fears new business owners and would-be entrepreneurs face as they start up in a sluggish market.

The solutions he offers are both time-tested and cutting-edge -- ensuring you'll land at the top by the time this sour economy turns sweeter. Learn how to measure your ROI, when and how to devise new marketing strategies to replace ones that don't work and how to gain more market share over your competitors.

What is marketing?
Mark Stevens: Marketing is the most misunderstood work in business; ask 100 people what marketing is, and you'll get 100 different answers. You get back: advertising, Web sites, good service, etc. It's all of those things, but the essence of marketing is that it's the movement of the business from one level of profitable revenue to the next.

Marketing has to be a driver of business growth, so if you're doing a million in revenue one year, the next year you need to be doing a million and a half, and then you take it to 2 million and so on. You can't stay where you are. You need a catalyst for growth.

Accounting can't drive growth, HR can't drive growth, organizational structure can't drive growth -- these are all important structures, but marketing is the engine for growth. The only valid definition of marketing is the ability to take a company from one level of profitable revenue and continue to do that.

What's the most common misperception people have about marketing?
What happens often is that people over the years have confused marketing with creativity. We'll have people come in typically right out of school and apply for a job and we'll say, "Why do you want to go into marketing?" And they'll say, "Because I'm a creative person." They say, "I like art" or "I like this and that."

Well, you really have to like business; what's happened over the years is that marketing has begun to focus on creativity, on aesthetics, on making beautiful commercials and ads or Web sites. These things have a place, but much more important is the development of a strategy that can effectively make the business two things -- scalable and sustainable.