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What is Marketing?

What is marketing?

If you want to learn marketing to share your ideas and solutions with your target audience to regain independence and freedom read further. Today we’ll dive into what marketing is and the four key decisions of marketing.

According to the American Marketing Association “Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large”. 

There are two ways to undertake marketing and they are through marketing strategies and marketing tactics. Marketing strategies are the overall effort marketing takes over time while tactics are the steps implemented to achieve the overall marketing strategy. 

It’s important to remember there are four key marketing decisions that influence marketing strategies and tactics. The four key marketing decisions are known as the marketing mix or marketing’s 4Ps. The 4Ps are product, promotion, place, and price which are informed by target market research. Target market research is gathering knowledge to understand customers, competitors, and the market; market research is the foundation of marketing. Through market research we can understand what a market’s need is and develop a product to satisfy it, then we can share information about the product’s benefits through promotions, then it’s important the product can be attained, so it’s distributed through the right places or channels, and finally price is the sacrifice or what a customer gives up for the products value.

This can be different for varying industries and products, but for a social media influencer it can look the following. A travel blogger wants to share their adventures with an audience interested in backpacking. The travel blogger knows these people want to learn about how to backpack, so he creates a guide on how they can start doing so. Then he shares this backpacking guide through his blog in exchange for his target audience to sign up for his email list. This is what the marketing mix can look like for a travel influencer. 

If you’re looking to learn more about digital marketing to regain independence and freedom make sure you follow for more since this is the first of many articles on the Marketing Fundamentals series.

Definitions

MARKETING DEFINED

  • Marketing is the strategies and tactics used to identify, create, and maintain good relationships leading to value for the customer and marketer.

STRATEGIES

  • Strategies are the direction marketing efforts take for a period of time

TACTICS

  • Tactics are actionable steps or decisions made in order to follow the strategies that have been established

IDENTIFY

  • Efforts needed to gain knowledge of customers, competitors, and markets by undertaking marketing research

CREATE

  • Competition forces marketers to be creative by creating new marketing strategies and tactics that help achieve organizational goals.

MAINTAIN:

  • Retaining customer relationships after first purchase

SATISFYING RELATIONSHIPS

  • A key objective of marketing is to connect good products with the customer that wants it and ensuring that customers feel that the marketer is building a strong relationship between the two

VALUE

  • The perception of what must be given up by a customer for what they want
  • Value is relative to the customer and might differ for the same product

Marketing's Key Tasks

Marketers have a variety of tools to create valuable relationships between businesses and customers which represent marketing’s key tasks.

Selecting Target Markets

  • Identifying the customers who’s need can be fulfilled with idea or solution offered

Creating Products

  • Tangible or intangible solutions to address customer needs of target market

Establishing Distribution

  • Products are only of value to target market if they can be obtained
  • Selecting distribution methods require careful consideration

Developing Promotions

  • Organizations communicate information about their products through advertising, sales promotion, personal selling, and public relations

Setting Price

  • Price is determined by what client is willing to give up for goods and services

Additional Skills

Marketer’s need to utilize the marketing key tasks in hand with additional skills to be successful. These additional skills are:

Conduct Market Research

  • Conducting Market Research is the gathering and analysis of market research to make marketing decisions
  • Market Research is the foundation of marketing

Understand Customers

  • Understanding customers will lead to developing better ideas and solutions to connect them to while understanding where, how, and why they buy

Monitor the External Environment

  • Monitoring the external environment is important since external factors can impact marketing key decisions

Create a Marketing Plan

  • Creating a marketing plan is essential for successful marketers since it provides a road map to success

Additional Marketing Concepts

Marketing Mix

  • The different combinations of Marketing key tasks

Target Marketing

  • Identifying customers who offer marketers the best chance for satisfying organizational objectives which drives product development, price, and marketing decisions

Cause Marketing

  • Activities intended to align an organization with a specific cause
  • Cause Marketing can lead to increased customer loyalty

Global Standardized Marketing

  • All markets are targeted with the same marketing mix

Global Adaptive Marketing

  • The marketing strategies and tactics originate in local markets allowing for customization of marketing mix