What Is Marketing? Definition, Benefits, and Strategies

Index

Definition of Marketing

The definition of marketing is the action or business of promoting and selling products or services, including market research and advertising. Today, marketing is something that every company and organization must implement in its growth strategy. Many companies use marketing techniques to achieve their goals without even realizing it, as they work to promote themselves and increase sales of their product or service. These days, marketing is one of the key aspects of businesses. 

People often do not know exactly what marketing is and, when asked, they define it as selling or advertising. While these answers are not wrong, they are only a part of marketing. There are many other aspects to marketing like product distribution, promotion, designing and creating materials like landing pages and social media content, improving customer experience, doing market research, establishing market segments, and much more.

Marketing is very broad and encompasses all the strategies that help a company, brand, or individual achieve its objectives.

The 4 Ps of Marketing

According to E. J. McCarthy, the 4 Ps of Marketing are a simple formula for identifying and working with the essential elements of your marketing strategy.

• Product.

  Having a product is key and is the root of all things

  marketing

  A

  product could be anything that a company offers consumers to satisfy a need. The best thing to do is to decide on your product or service based both on the needs and

  product could be anything that a company offers consumers to satisfy a need. The best thing to do is to decide on your product or service based both on the needs and motivations of consumers and how the product would benefit the consumer, rather than on the object’s physical characteristics or attributes.

• Place.

   

  Strategic merchandising locations can be anything from an online store to a channel of physical stores across multiple towns or countries. The goal of the distribution strategy is to enable potential clients to have easy access to your products/services as well as offer a good experience throughout the purchasing process.  

• Price.

  How you price your products and services is an extremely important part of the

  marketing strategy. This factor affects other factors such as:

  • The margin you hope to obtain.

  • What target market do you want to appeal to and what purchasing power do your consumers have? Do you want to enter the luxury market or the mass market?

  • The company’s financial goals.

  • How does the competition price their products and what possible product substitutes are there?

  • Trends and fads.

  • Increasing your price in order to give a better perception of quality.

• Promotion.

  This refers to all the

  marketing

  and communication that is done in order to showcase the benefits of your product or service within the market. This is how you increase sales.

What Does Marketing Do for Your Business?

Marketing can help your business in countless ways but let’s take a look at a few of the most impactful ones.

1. Raising Brand Awareness

This is important because it gets people acquainted with your brand and the products or services you provide. It also makes you memorable to customers who can begin to trust your brand, become loyal clients, and tell their network about you.

2. Generating Traffic

Growing the number of visitors to your site means getting more qualified leads (lead scoring can help determine this) and ultimately increasing your sales. An effective marketing strategy will help you through this process. 

3. Increasing Revenue

Every business wants to increase its sales and marketing can help achieve this goal through a variety of strategies like optimizing your website and SEO, creating email campaigns, performing A/B tests to pinpoint the best strategy for you, and much more.

4. Building Trust in Your Brand

Creating a high level of trust in your brand leads to customer loyalty and repeat purchases. This not only increases revenue but also leads to great reviews both online and by word of mouth, which is still one of the most effective types of promotion.

5. Tracking Your Metrics

Metrics are incredibly helpful when it comes to creating your marketing strategy. They not only drive the strategy and help track its progress but also inform what can be adapted or adjusted to continually optimize your campaigns. 

Different Marketing Strategies 

Marketing is not just one single strategy, but rather a combination of many different techniques and tactics. Below we’ve listed some essential marketing strategies that you should know about. Click on the red links to learn more about each of these strategies. 

• Marketing Plan: Discover what a marketing plan is, why you need to design one, and the keys to creating a strong plan. Without a marketing plan, a company or brand can’t reach its goals.

  Discover what a marketing plan is, why you need to design one, and the keys to creating a strong plan. Without a marketing plan, a company or brand can’t reach its goals.

• Digital Marketing:

  Digital marketing

  is the discipline of

  marketing

   which focuses on developing a strategy solely within the digital environment.

• Direct Marketing:

  Direct marketing

  is a type of campaign based on direct, two-way communication that seeks to trigger a result from a specific audience.

• Email Marketing:

   

  Email marketing

  is one of the most profitable and effective techniques in terms of return. Naturally, it consists of sending emails to your audience, but make sure to define your segments well in order to be effective.

• Mobile Marketing:

   

  Mobile marketing

  is a broad concept which brings together all marketing campaigns and actions focused exclusively on mobile platforms and applications (i.e. smartphones and tablets).

• Viral Marketing:

   Having something go viral is every company’s dream.

  Viral Marketing

  spreads from one person to the next and is capable of going incredibly far incredibly fast.

• Performance Marketing:

   

  Performance marketing

  is a methodology which applies various marketing methods and techniques and guarantees advertisers that they only have to pay for achieved results.

• Inbound Marketing: This methodology focuses on creating valuable content to attract qualified web traffic and work towards the final sale.