What Is Marketing?

It’s one thing to run a business, it’s another thing to make a business a success.

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Some of the main factors that will help you achieve success are:

Strategy

People

Operations

Marketing

Finances

In this article we will be talking about Marketing.

Marketing is the practice of raising awareness about your company, acquiring customers and making sure they come back again.

Conversions are not just for preachers

In an age of mass advertising, making your voice heard can be very challenging.

You’ll be competing with many other businesses which are fighting for market share just like you are. Getting yourself out there is going to be a tough battle!

This is where intelligent and effective marketing comes in. You need to draw consumers towards your business and come to prefer it over the competition, a process known as conversion.

Scenario

You run a bakery and café.

You place a poster in the window advertising that customers can purchase a cup of coffee and a slice of cake for £3.

A customer walking by on their lunch break sees this poster.

Enticed by the offer, they enter the building and make a purchase. So satisfied are they by this deal and the service provided, they continue to eat at your café on future lunch breaks.

This is marketing and conversion in action.

Analysis

You sent out a message describing what your company does and why your company should be favoured over the competition – you sell hot drinks and cake, and you offer them cheaply.

Your message is then received by a customer, who considers both these things and is drawn into a decision based on your marketing – the customer is hungry, and you’re offering cheap food.

This is a highly simplified scenario, and to truly maximise on the benefits of marketing you need to properly understand the process and how it should be employed.

Modern Marketing – A Battle for Consumer Loyalty

While it would be nice to live in a world where you can dominate a given market with minimal competition, such a world seldom exists for very long.

Wherever sufficient demand for a product or service exists, people will try to meet it. As such, marketing is basically a competition between various suppliers over securing as high a percentage of that customer base as possible.

Unless you’re in that very happy position of being one of the first companies in a market, such as Apple or Microsoft in computer software and hardware, you will need to make yourself stand out from the rest of the crowd.

This can only be achieved through a well thought-out Marketing Strategy.

The 4 P’s

In principle, the main strategy of marketing has been summarised into what has been called the Four P’s.

Product, price, promotion, place.

All of these play into how your marketing will work.

Ask your self some questions:

What does your product do?
What do your customers get out of it?
How is it different to other products of a similar nature; what sets it apart?
Meanwhile, with price, are you offering the product at a price that is competitive to those of your rivals?

Promotion is the act of giving information to the public, whether broadly or through targeted campaigns, about your product to generate interest and awareness.

Finally, place is about how and where you sell your product. Do you sell directly in stores to local consumers, or are you part of a long international supply chain?

Once all these points have been considered, you can help formulate a proper strategy to help you promote your product and make it known to the markets.

If you need help creating a strategy, click here to speak to me.

Types of Marketing

There are several types of marketing that can employed, and which ones you use will depend on your product, your resources, and your intended audience.

Print marketing

Perhaps the oldest, cheapest and most pervasive form of marketing you’ll have access to. It involves things such as flyers, posters, brochures, bill board ads, and newspaper ads. For just under a few hundred pounds, you can print off several thousand posters and flyers to be put up in windows across town.

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Broadcasted marketing

This includes TV and radio. Radio ads tend to be cheaper, but TV ads will hit a much broader audience. They often require a fair amount of cash not just to hire the airtime necessary for the advert to run, but also to produce the advert itself.

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Digital marketing

This is much more recent, having only really come into its own within the last twenty years or so. It includes everything from banner ads on websites, search engine listings, targeted emails, and advertising on social media.

Social media marketing especially has really revolutionised the marketing industry, and tackling this technique has the capacity to quickly, easily, and cheaply reach millions of consumers.