Understanding Marketing: Marketing as a discipline involves all the actions a company undertakes to attract customers and maintain relationships with them. Networking with potential or past clients is part of the work too, and may include writing thank you emails, playing golf with prospective clients, returning calls and emails quickly, and meeting with clients for coffee or a meal.
At the basic level, marketing seeks to match a company’s products and services to customers who want access to those products. Matching products to customers ultimately ensures profitability.
So, What is Marketing Actually?
Marketing refers to activities a company undertakes to promote the buying or selling of a product or service. Marketing includes advertising, selling, and delivering products to consumers or other businesses. Some marketing is done by affiliates on behalf of a company.
Professionals who work in a corporation’s marketing and promotion departments seek to get the attention of vital potential audiences through advertising. Promotions are targeted to certain audiences and may involve celebrity endorsements, catchy phrases or slogans, memorable packaging or graphic designs, and overall media exposure.
4 Pillars Of Marketing
According to Neil Borden popularized the idea of the marketing mix and the concept of the Four Ps in the 1950s. Product, price, place, and promotion are the 4 Pillars of marketing. The 4 Pillars collectively make up the essential mix a company needs to market a product or service.
01. Product
Product refers to an item or items the business plans to offer to customers. The product should seek to fulfill an absence in the market, or fulfill consumer demand for a greater amount of a product already available. Before they can prepare an appropriate campaign, marketers need to understand what product is being sold, how it stands out from its competitors, whether the product can also be paired with a secondary product or product line, and whether there are substitute products in the market.
02. Price
Price refers to how much the company will sell the product for. When establishing a price, companies must consider the unit cost price, marketing costs, and distribution expenses. Companies must also consider the price of competing products in the marketplace and whether their proposed price point is sufficient to represent a reasonable alternative for consumers.
03. Place
Place refers to the distribution of the product. Key considerations include whether the company will sell the product through a physical storefront, online, or through both distribution channels. When it’s sold in a storefront, what kind of physical product placement does it get? When it’s sold online, what kind of digital product placement does it get?
04. Promotion
Promotion, the fourth P, is the integrated marketing communications campaign. Promotion includes a variety of activities such as advertising, selling, sales promotions, public relations, direct marketing, sponsorship, etc.
Promotions vary depending on what stage of the product life cycle the product is in. Marketers understand that consumers associate a product’s price and distribution with its quality, and they take this into account when devising the overall marketing strategy.
Types of Marketing Strategies
Marketing is comprised of an incredibly broad and diverse set of strategies. The industry continues to evolve, and the strategies below may be better suited for some companies over others.
5 Traditional Marketing Strategies
Before technology and the internet, traditional market strategies were the primary way companies would market their goods to customers. The main types of traditional marketing strategies include:
1. Outdoor Marketing
This entails public displays of advertising external to a consumer’s house. This includes billboards, printed advertisements on benches, sticker wraps on vehicles, or advertisements on public transit.
2. Print Marketing
This entails small, easily printed content that is easy to replicate. Companies often mass produce printed materials as the printed materials delivered to one customer do not need to vary from another. Examples include brochures, fliers, newspaper ads, or magazine ads.
3. Direct Marketing
This entails specific content delivered to potential customers. Some print marketing content could be mailed. Otherwise, direct marketing mediums could include coupons, vouchers for free goods, or pamphlets.
4. Electronic Marketing
This entails the use of TV and radio for advertising. Through short bursts of digital content, a company can convey information to a customer through visual or auditory media that may grab a viewer’s attention better than the printed form above.
5. Event Marketing
This entails attempting to gather potential customers at a specific location for the opportunity to speak with them about products or demonstrate products. This includes conferences, trade shows, seminars, roadshows, or private events.
5 Digital Marketing Strategies
The marketing industry has been forever changed by the introduction of digital marketing. From the early days of pop-up ads to targeted placements based on viewing history, there are now innovative ways companies can reach customers through digital marketing.
1. Search Engine Marketing
This entails companies attempting to increase search traffic in two ways. First, companies can pay search engines for placement on result pages. Second, companies can emphasize search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to organically place high on search results.
2. E-mail Marketing
This entails companies obtaining customer or potential customer e-mail addresses and distributing messages. These messages can include coupons, discount opportunities, or advance notice of upcoming sales.
3. Social Media Marketing
This entails building an online presence on specific social media platforms. Like search engine marketing, companies can place paid advertisements to bypass algorithms and obtain a higher chance of being seen by viewers. Otherwise, a company can attempt to organically grow by posting content, interacting with followers, or uploading media like photos and videos.
4. Affiliate Marketing
This entails using third-party advertising to drive customer interest. Often, an affiliate that will get a commission from a sale will do affiliate marketing as the third party is incentivized to drive a sale for a good that is not their own original product.
5. Content Marketing
This entails creating content, whether eBooks, infographics, video seminars, or other downloadable content. The goal is to create a product (often free) to share information about a product, obtain customer information, and encourage customers to continue with the company beyond the content.
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6 Benefits of Marketing
Well-defined marketing strategies can benefit a company in several ways. It may be challenging in developing the right strategy or executing the plan; when done well, marketing can yield the following results.
1. Audience Generation.
Marketing allows a company to target specific people it believes will benefit from its product or service. Sometimes, people know they have the need. Other times, they don’t realize it. Marketing enables a company to connect with a cohort of people that fit the demographic that the company aims to serve.
2. Inward Education.
Marketing is useful for collecting information to be processed internally to drive success. For example, consider market research that finds a certain product is primarily purchased by women aged 18-34 years old. By collecting this information, a company can better understand how to cater to this demographic, drive sales, and be more efficient with resources.
3. Outward Education.
Marketing can also be used to communicate with the world what your company does, what products you sell, and how your company can enrich the lives of others. Campaigns can be educational, informing those outsides of your company why they need your product. In addition, marketing campaigns let a company introduce itself, its history, its owners, and its motivation for being the company it is.
4. Brand Creation.
Marketing allows a company to take an offensive approach to create a brand. Instead of a customer shaping their opinion of a company based on their interactions, a company can preemptively engage a customer with specific content or media to drive certain emotions or reactions. This allows a company to shape its image before the customer has ever interacted with its products.
5. Long-lasting.
Marketing campaigns done right can have a long-lasting impact on customers. Consider Poppin’ Fresh, also known as the Pillsbury Doughboy. First appearing in 1965, the mascot has helped create a long-lasting, warm, friendly brand for Pillsbury.
6. Financial Performance.
The ultimate goal and benefit of marketing are to drive sales. When relationships with customers are stronger, well-defined, and positive, customers are more likely to engage in sales. When marketing is done right, customers turn to your company, and you gain a competitive advantage over your competitors. Even if both products are exactly the same, marketing can create that competitive advantage for why a client picks you over someone else.
Limitations of Marketing
Though there are many reasons a company embarks on marketing campaigns, there are several limitations to the industry.
Oversaturation.
Every company wants customers to buy its product and not its competitors. Therefore, marketing channels can be competitive as companies strive to garner more positive attention and recognition. If too many companies are competing, a customer’s attention may be strongly diluted, resulting in any form of advertising not being effective.
Devaluation.
When a company promotes a price discount or sale, the public may psychologically eventually see that product as worth less in the future. If a campaign is so strong, customers may even wait to purchase a good knowledge or remember what the sale price was from before. For example, some may intentionally on holding off on buying goods if Black Friday is approaching.
No Guaranteed Success.
Marketing campaigns may incur upfront expenses that hold no promise of future success. This is also true of market research studies, where time, effort, and resources are poured into a study that may yield no usable or helpful results.
Customer Bias.
Loyal, long-time customers need no enticing to buy a company’s brand or product. However, newer, uninitiated customers may. Marketing naturally is biased towards non-loyal patrons as those who already support the company would be better served in further investment in better products.
Cost.
Marketing campaigns may be expensive. Digital marketing campaigns may be labor-intensive to set up and costly to maintain the scheduling, implementation, and execution of the plan. Don’t forget about the headlines that promote Super Bowl commercial expenses in the millions.
Economy-Dependent.
Marketing is most successful when people have the capital to spend. Though marketing can create non-financial benefits such as brand loyalty and product recognition, the ultimate goal is to drive sales. During unfavorable macroeconomic conditions when unemployment is high or recession concerns are elevated, consumers may be less like to spend no matter how great a market campaign may be.
Closure
An important goal of marketing is propelling a company’s growth. This can be seen through attracting and retaining new customers.
Companies may apply a number of different marketing strategies to achieve these goals. For instance, matching products with customers’ needs could involve personalization, prediction, and essentially knowing the right problem to solve.
Another strategy is creating value through the customer experience. This is demonstrated through efforts to elevate customer satisfaction and remove any difficulties with the product or service.
Sure, Marketing Strategies above according to your Objectives & Goals.
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Reference: investopedia.com
The Right Market, The Right Strategy, and The Right Content!