What is an offering in marketing?
What is an offering in marketing?
Hello there my name is Martin Henley, this is the what the series and in this episode number nine I’m answering the question What is an offering in marketing?
In addressing this question what is an offering? there are five things we’ll be sharing with you — we are going to give you a definition from the Oxford English Dictionary: we’re going to give you a more specific marketing definition; we’re going to think about why you need to consider your offering; how you consider your offering and when you consider your offering.
Let’s go Ricky. so
Did we find a definition of offering?
As always to understand what an offering is we went for a definition and we found one right at the top of Google supplied by the Oxford English Dictionary; they tell us that “an offering is a thing offered especially as a gift or contribution, a thing produced for entertainment or sale,” that sounds more like what we’re interested in “a contribution especially of money to a church or a thing offered as a religious sacrifice or token of devotion.”
This is the issue with English occasionally, sometimes a word can have several meanings. There’s not a huge amount of difference in these meanings but actually we’re interested in a marketing offering, so we’re not interested in something that is contributed as a religious sacrifice, we’re certainly not interested in human sacrifice, what we’re interested in is more a thing that is produced for entertainment or sale
A more marketing specific definition of offering.
We need a more marketing specific definition of an offering and we found one at AZ Central. What they tell us is that “an offering is more than the product itself, it includes elements that add value such as availability, delivery, support and quality.” This is a really important consideration when you consider your offering. What we are seeing here is that an offering is the whole package, the whole deal, and when you come to think about your pricing these are things that become very important.
Why should you consider your offering?
The question now becomes why do you need to consider your offering? Surely you know better than anyone what it is that you sell?
The first issue here is about perspective. Because you work all day every day in your business you will have developed a vocabulary so you can talk and act efficiently around the issues that you address for your customers. However, that’s not to say just because you have a widget x3c b25 that your customers will think about it in exactly the same way. You need to be thinking about your offering, you need to be doing your keyword research that we spoke about in the last video and you need to make sure that you are presenting your offering in the way that people are searching for it.
The second issue is about making it easy for people to buy. My recommendation is that you produce a menu of all of your products and services and all of the added value. What that does is make it really simple for people to see what you offer, how much you charge for those offerings and what buying them involves; it makes it easy for them to buy.
Once you have that the next step is product development. There was a study conducted in the UK where they found that it is 17 times more cost-effective to sell new products to your existing customers than it is to sell your existing products to new customers. You want to be thinking all the time, what else is it that we could be offering to the market.
What I’m going to show you now is how you can use Google autocomplete to see the questions that people asking Google about the products and services that you provide.
I’m hoping that you’re hearing me and you’re thinking “yeah, this sounds like a really good idea I need to assess my offering” and don’t worry we are assessing the way that we spell assess.
When it comes to assessing your offering you need to be interrogating your offering. You need to know the answers to questions like — Which of our offerings are more popular? Which offerings are more attractive? Which offerings should we put at the front of our business to attract people into our business? Which offerings are the most profitable? Which offerings deliver the most value for our customers? Which offerings are they likely to continue to buy and refer? You need to think about what it is that your customers buy and what else you could be selling them.
You also need to think about who buys? how they buy? where they buy? when they buy? You need to think about why they buy specifically because if you can answer that question and develop that into a message you just need to be landing that message on your market and you will have very effective marketing happening.
Its important when you are interrogating your offering that you go to your systems for this information. You will know intuitively the answers to all of these questions, but that doesn’t mean those are the right answers. When you go to your systems and you get data you will see what’s actually going on and that’s really really important when you come to do an assessment of your offering.
When should you assess your marketing offering?
Which brings us to point number five which is the question when to assess your offering? I don’t want to sound like a broken record here but the very best time to do your offering analysis is before you start your business. If you ensure, before you even start, that you are providing the products and services that people are already looking for you will be well ahead in your marketing. If you didn’t asses your offering before you started your then you need to do it now and you need to do it regularly. There are lots of examples of products that have evolved over time. As people’s needs change they search for slightly different things. You need to make sure that the thing that you are offering is presented in the perspective of your customers and remains the thing that they are looking for continuously.
Did we adequately define marketing offering?
If you are still with us well done. You now know exactly what an offering is; you have a marketing specific definition of what an offering is; you know why you need to consider your offering; how to consider your offering and when to consider your offering.
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We are done here Ricky.
Martin Henley
Martin has built a reputation for having a no nonsense approach to sales and marketing and for motivating audiences with his wit, energy, enthusiasm and his own brand of audience participation. Martin’s original content is based on his very current experience of running effective marketing initiatives for his customers and the feedback from Effective Marketing’s successful and popular marketing workshops.