In business and strategic planning, finding new customers is the role of marketing. After you sift through all the semantics, misused business lingo, and fuzzy concepts, marketing is really pretty simple: Identify who you want to sell to, figure out how to get those people to notice you, and when they do, get them to buy from you.
So if marketing is this simple, why does it continue to be confusing? Mainly because most people make it too complicated. At the end of the day, nothing matters until you have a sale. And the only person who can make that decision is the customer. As management guru Peter Drucker says, “The purpose of a business is to create a customer.” Period.
The primary reason marketing campaigns fail is because customers weren’t offered something they wanted, needed, or valued. The components of a campaign — the product, the product’s price, the product’s advertising, the sales channels, the salespeople, and the customer service — can contribute to the failure. But ultimately, the problem comes down to the fact that the customer wasn’t satisfied.
Whether you’re selecting market development or market penetration as potential growth strategies, implementing either of them requires reaching new markets.