Getting a job consists of marketing and selling yourself to a company. This is the same thing as a company's marketing and selling its products to its customers. The techniques used to market a product are collectively called the "marketing mix". The marketing mix is the marketer's toolbox. Marketers use some or all of the tools in varying ways and in differing proportions. How marketers use the marketing mix is a function of selling goals, skills, targeting of customers' needs, budgets, competition. The marketing mix includes advertising, publicity, packaging, pricing, market research, direct mail, and numerous other disciplines.
You must consider all possible pieces of the marketing mix in marketing yourself. Your marketing plan for yourself will be a recipe of the ingredients in the marketing mix.
Your Marketing Mix
ADVERTISING When someone who knows you, or knows of you, recommends you to a potential employer, that is word-of-mouth advertising. Ask influential people you know to spread the word.
DATABASE MARKETING Build your people file with letters, press and magazine clippings of interest, e-mails, and phone calls - and use it.
DIRECT MARKETING Sending a letter to a hiring person in a target company with a message tailored to the company is effective direct mail.
LEAD GENERATION Identifying a hiring company, getting an introduction, or getting a referral are sales leads. Networking, want ads, and industry publications are good sources.
MARKET RESEARCH Use the Internet, the library, publications, the street, and the phone to learn all you can about the target company, its industry, and its people.
MEDIA PLAN Use the Internet to connect companies and respond to companies. Put up a personalized web site.
PRICING The marketplace usually sets the price - the compensation for your job - but showing your economic value and dollarizing your impact is crucial to the hiring person.
PUBLICITY Write articles, contact organizers for associations, and give speeches on what you know. Put writers, reporters, editors in your database. Let them know you are available for a quote.
SEGMENTATION The world of organizations can be segmeneted by geography, industry, size, customers, culture, age, whether they are private or public, profit or not-for-profit, and countless variations. Your forty-mile radius is the first step (see Draw a Forty-mile Circle, Chapter 9).
SELLING You are selling yourself. There are books on selling. Read them.
TRADESHOWS Job fairs are trade shows for hiring employers. Industry trade shows are where companies selling to common customers present themselves. Visit your target companies at trade shows.