What is Marketing? Strategies and types are explained in detail

What is Marketing?

Marketing encompasses all activities undertaken by a company to draw an audience to its products or services through effective messaging. Its objective is to provide inherent value to prospects and consumers through content, with the ultimate aim of showcasing product value, fostering brand loyalty, and driving sales growth.

Initially, I questioned the necessity of marketing in product development, sales pitches, or retail distribution. However, it becomes clear when you consider that marketers have the keenest insight into your consumer persona. The primary objective of marketing is to continually research and analyze consumers, utilizing methods such as focus groups, surveys, and studying online shopping habits. The central question driving these efforts is: "Where, when, and how does our consumer want to communicate with our business?" In this discussion, we will delve into the objectives of marketing, various types of marketing, the 4 P's of marketing, and the distinction between marketing and advertising. Whether you're an experienced marketer seeking to refresh your understanding or a novice seeking to grasp the fundamentals of marketing, we have you covered.

The Objective of Marketing

Marketing involves the process of generating interest in a company's product or service. This is achieved through market research, analysis, and understanding the preferences of the target audience. It encompasses various aspects of a business, including product development, distribution methods, sales, and advertising.

The origins of modern marketing can be traced back to the 1950s, when marketers began utilizing more than just print media to promote products. With the advent of television and subsequently the internet, marketers gained the ability to conduct comprehensive campaigns across multiple platforms. Over the past seven decades, marketers have increasingly played a crucial role in optimizing the selling process for businesses.

Fundamentally, the purpose of marketing is to attract consumers to a brand through messaging. Ideally, this messaging should be informative and educational for the target audience, facilitating the conversion of consumers into leads. In the contemporary landscape, there are numerous avenues available for conducting marketing campaigns, posing the question of where to focus efforts in the 21st century.

Types of Marketing

The platforms where your marketing campaigns are situated are determined by the preferences of your customers and where they spend their time. It's your responsibility to conduct market research to identify the most effective types of marketing and the appropriate mix of tools within each category to enhance your brand. Here are several types of marketing that remain relevant today, some of which have endured over time.

Search Engine Marketing

Search engine marketing (SEM) encompasses various marketing approaches that utilize search engines such as Google as their primary tool. It typically involves two digital strategies: search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. SEO focuses on optimizing website content to improve search engine rankings, aiming for higher visibility on SERPs. Meanwhile, PPC advertising ensures your website appears in the paid search results section of SERPs, requiring payment for each click. While SEO targets organic traffic, PPC drives traffic through paid means. Both methods are effective in boosting website traffic.

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is often viewed as a subset of content marketing, but numerous marketers argue that it merits standalone recognition. Seen as a cost-efficient tool, social media can significantly enhance audience engagement, consumer education, and product sales.

Diverse platforms offer various avenues for social media marketing, with certain platforms proving more effective depending on specific marketing objectives. For instance, B2B enterprises typically find LinkedIn and Facebook more fruitful compared to Instagram and YouTube. Conversely, visually-oriented businesses like e-commerce ventures tend to thrive on platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook. Nonetheless, with a solid strategy in place, reaching your target audience is feasible across any platform.

Email Marketing

Many companies utilize email marketing due to its significant effectiveness. This marketing strategy entails sending emails to both customers and prospects with the aim of boosting sales and guiding customers seamlessly through the sales funnel, resulting in notable conversion rates and returns.

To embark on email marketing, it's imperative to build a subscriber list, which may require initial effort if you're starting from scratch. However, once you've amassed subscribers, you can implement various email strategies and drip campaigns, including updates on new product releases, reminders for abandoned carts, and informative newsletters, all geared towards facilitating the customer journey. Prior to crafting your email campaigns, it's essential to delve into the intricacies of the customer journey specific to email marketing and explore the potential of automation in enhancing sales outcomes.

Both B2B and B2C companies stand to benefit from integrating email marketing and automation into their sales processes. While B2C marketing emails typically emphasize swift transactions, B2B enterprises can leverage automation to complement their sales strategies and maintain a steady influx of potential customers in the sales pipeline.

Content Marketing 

Content marketing is a valuable inbound marketing approach focused on educating and engaging customers through online information about products, brands, or industries. Examples of content marketing include blogs, organic social media posts, e-guides, and video. Its goal is to equip customers with the necessary information to facilitate their purchasing decisions.

Influencer Marketing

In some perspectives, influencer marketing is regarded as a component of social media marketing, whereas others view it as an independent strategy. This marketing approach enables businesses to utilize the existing relationships that influencers and opinion leaders have established with their audiences.

Influencers, being authorities in their respective fields, have attained a level of credibility that many businesses strive to achieve. Consequently, their followers are inclined to heed their product recommendations. Consequently, engaging in influencer marketing can amplify brand visibility, enhance brand recognition, and drive sales.

While influencer marketing is predominantly employed in B2C scenarios, particularly within e-commerce sectors, B2B enterprises can also capitalize on this strategy provided they identify a thought leader in the industry with a substantial following.

Print Marketing

Print marketing involves utilizing print media to raise awareness of your company's brand. This form of marketing encompasses advertisements in various print mediums such as magazines, brochures, and billboards. Although measuring the effectiveness of print marketing can be challenging, there are strategies available to ensure optimal performance. For instance, print marketing can be tailored to target specific geographic areas for localized promotion, or it can be utilized in national publications to garner broader brand recognition across multiple regions.

Print marketing holds potential effectiveness for businesses across different sectors. However, it's crucial to carefully select the target magazines. For instance, B2B enterprises might opt to advertise in trade publications tailored to their industry niche, while B2C companies may prefer consumer magazines with a broader audience reach, albeit less specific in nature.

Understanding Marketing and Advertising

If marketing were compared to a wheel, advertising would be just one of the spokes. Marketing encompasses product development, market research, distribution, sales strategy, public relations, and customer support. It plays a crucial role in every stage of a business's sales journey, utilizing various platforms, social media channels, and internal teams to identify the target audience, communicate effectively, amplify their message, and foster brand loyalty over time.

On the other hand, advertising is merely a single aspect of marketing. It is a strategic endeavor, typically paid for, aimed at raising awareness of a product or service within the broader objectives outlined above. In simple terms, it is not the sole method employed by marketers to promote a product.

Here's an illustration (keep reading, there's a quiz at the end): Imagine a company launching a new product and aiming to promote it to its customer base. The company's chosen channels are Facebook, Instagram, Google, and its own website, all utilized for various campaigns every quarter to generate leads.

To announce the new product, the company publishes a downloadable product guide on its website, shares a video on Instagram showcasing the product, and invests in sponsored search results on Google directing traffic to a dedicated product page on its website.

Now, which decisions above constitute marketing, and which are advertising? The advertising occurred on Instagram and Google. While Instagram is not typically considered an advertising platform, it can serve as a branding channel to cultivate a follower base receptive to occasional product announcements. In this case, Google was utilized for advertising as the company paid for space, employing a pay-per-click (PPC) program to drive traffic to a specific product page, a classic online ad.

Where did the marketing take place? This was a bit of a trick question, as the marketing encompassed the entire process. By aligning Instagram, Google, and its own website with a customer-focused initiative, the company executed a comprehensive marketing campaign that identified its audience, crafted a message tailored to that audience, and disseminated it across multiple platforms to maximize its impact.

The 4 Ps of Marketing 

During the 1960s, E. Jerome McCarthy introduced the concept of the 4 Ps of marketing: product, price, place, and promotion. These four elements elucidate how marketing intersects with every phase of a business.

Product

Let's say you've come up with an idea for a product you want your business to sell. What's next? If you start selling it, you probably won't succeed. Instead, you should have your marketing team conduct market research and answer some. critical questions: Who is your target audience? Is the market fit for this product? Which messaging will increase product sales and on which platforms? How should your product developers change the product to increase the likelihood of success? What do the focus groups think about the product? , and what questions or hesitations do they have? Marketers use the answers to these questions to help businesses understand product demand and improve product quality by noting concerns stemming from focus group or survey participants. Price Your marketing team will test competitors' products. determine prices or use focus groups and surveys to estimate how much your ideal customer is willing to pay. If you price too high, you will lose out on a solid customer base. Price too low and you may lose more money than you make. Fortunately, marketers can use industry research and consumer analysis to gauge a good price range. 

Price

Your marketing team will assess competitors' product pricing or utilize focus groups and surveys to gauge the willingness of your ideal customer to pay. Setting the price too high may result in losing potential customers, while setting it too low could lead to financial losses. Fortunately, marketers can rely on industry research and consumer analysis to determine an optimal price range.

Place

It is crucial for your marketing department to leverage their comprehension of your business's consumers to provide recommendations on where and how to distribute your product. This may involve considerations such as whether an ecommerce platform or a physical retail location would be more suitable, or which geographic locations offer the most promising sales prospects, both domestically and internationally.

Promotion

This aspect involves any online or print advertising, events, or discounts created by your marketing team to enhance awareness and interest in your product, ultimately driving sales. Activities during this phase may include public relations campaigns, advertisements, or social media promotions.

In conclusion, understanding marketing's purpose and its application through the four Ps is essential for business success. Marketing intersects with various facets of a business, so mastering its principles is vital for enhancing overall efficiency and achieving success.