Most start-up and small businesses see marketing as a 'black art'.

They fail to understand how it really works and consequently grasp onto hollow hopes by falling into the many advertising traps that make unrealistic promises they know can never be fulfilled.

To avoid these traps, and use marketing as a vehicle to business growth, Netflare has developed a process to give you the understanding needed to make the right decisions on your own. This process isn't simple, it isn't easy, it can even be hard work. Here is a brief introduction to how Netflare can help you and what's involved...

Do You Know Where You're Heading?

Take a look at the big successful companies. One of those will probably be doing what you do, only better. Possibly that is the business that you aspire to become.

Perhaps you have a spark of uniqueness, or a willingness to go the extra mile for your customers, or you provide a service that know one else is prepared to do.

Whatever product or service you provide, only your passion, will power and immeasurable determination to succeed will keep you going. But without focus - knowing where you're heading - your business may be taking you somewhere else.

Introducing Strategy Builder: Learn the Fundamentals of Marketing

Netflare has discovered the bedrock to lay the foundations of successful marketing strategies and call it 'Strategy Builder'. The essence of Strategy Builder is getting your business posture right. Business Posture is about knowing yourself. That means knowing your passion, your motives and your uniqueness. Once you know these fundamental elements, you can determine your purpose. Until you have this, nothing in marketing will make much sense.

Taking Action: Exploration, Creativity and Discovery

At the early stages of your business, planning is the tedious part. Taking action and doing things is reason why you started your business. That's why Netflare encourage exploration, creativity and discovery before any serious planning begins.

Netflare show you how to explore your markets with customer analysis techniques. The results of this will help you derive your 'Quality Issues'.

Quality issues are the differences between the current qualities of your customers, and their desired qualities. An example of a quality issue might be 'integrity'. Perhaps the reason why a particular customer won't buy the best option that gives them the best return on investment is because they have insufficient grounds to trust you. By substantiating your 'integrity' through various marketing exercises, you can improve this 'quality issue' and hence improve your sales. Using this principle, knowing your quality issues, you can tailor your marketing to improve them.

Next, Netflare give you the tools to develop your creativity. Only you can describe your passion, your motives, and your uniqueness. That's why Netflare has developed techniques in writing styles to help you get your message across. Using these writing techniques, you will be able to write the content for your website and any other marketing channels such as letters, flyers or adverts.

Once your website is launched, this will be the discovery stage. You will discover what works and what doesn't. You will be keen to gain as much visibility as possible and be tempted to spend large amounts on advertising. This is where planning becomes important...

Marketing Strategies and Planning

The act of writing a marketing strategy, whether implemented partially or completely, will mean that your business is more likely to succeed. Netflare will help you outline what should be in your strategy document and assist in setting achievable, measurable targets.

Turning these strategies into a plan is an exercise of implementation. Think of the strategy as the map, with the target as a given location, and the plan is the route to get there. If things get in the way, it is the plan that changes, not the strategy.

Netflare show you how to build plans and implement them. By constantly testing and measuring, you will learn how to adjust your plans accordingly so that whatever route you take, you will achieve your targets.

Grow and Evolve through Knowledge Management

With cumulative successes, your business will grow. As it does, key decisions will need to be made that will have serious affects on its direction. This is where the data and information held within the business, together with an understanding of the connections and patterns within that data will become fundamental to these key decisions.

This is when Netflare introduces you to Knowledge Management. By deciding how your data and information is looked after and nurtured within your organisation, you will be able to make the correct decisions.

The ultimate capacity and capability of your organisation will be determined by the effecitve utilisation of your organisation's knowledge management.

Without effective knowledge management, your organisation risks either stagnation or exponential costs and wasted effort in attempts to grow your existing structures.

Only with the true knowledge of your own business can you begin to take advantage of the available marketing tools at your disposal. With this understanding, it is not surprising that many businesses say marketing doesn't work.

Having the freedom to explore, create and discover will mean you can be adventurous in setting your targets. With measures in place, based on your quality issues, you can test your marketing ideas and change your plans as frequently as you wish.