Developing A Customer-Centered Marketing Strategy (Instructed by Dave Jones, Ph.D.)

Customers or clients are never all the same. Marketing always begins with an understanding of the customer by understanding their wants, needs and desires, and how these can be fulfilled with products and services. Marketing strategies are plans that identify different types of benefits sought by clients and the specific services most likely to appeal to dissimilar groups (marketing segmentation). In the nonprofit sector we often create programs and services without the benefit of fully understanding those who use and support our services. When we do segment markets, we often use demographic descriptions, rather than truly strategic customer characteristics. You will learn the basics of market segmentation and how to use cost effective marketing research to identify segments and program and service weaknesses and strengths. Along with using techniques to identify different benefit segments, these strategies can also be applied to promotional communication to match communications to key audience characteristics. Finally, you will learn how to research your competition to successfully establish your organization's market position and to apply...