Marketing 101: The ABC of Marketing for Beginners
By Sam Nguyen
Are you bringing your business idea to the world? Do you want to succeed in marketing? These questions can be answered via the fundamental knowledge of marketing. It will help you take a step back to see the bigger picture of marketing.
This article will be your cup of tea to help you understand all the general understanding of marketing. And, to create clear thoughts on how you can apply it for your own business effectively. Or, the content can help you to refresh your mind and improve your current strategy.
Main Contents:
- What Is Marketing? {#what-is-marketing}
- Why Customers Are Essential In Marketing {#why-customers-are-essential}
- How Does Marketing Process Work? {#how-marketing-work}
- What Is Marketing Mix? {#marketing-mix}
- Modern Marketing {#modern-marketing}
- Final Words
What Is Marketing?
In the outsider’s eye, marketing is typically related to advertising and selling certain products. However, they do not stop at providing the best information to the buyers but also knows best about the business’s customer persona, they research and analyze consumers frequently, finding focus group, studying virtual buyers buying behavior.
According to Investopedia, marketing refers to the activities of a company which includes advertising, selling, and delivering products to the customers or other businesses.
When implementing, we can understand that all marketing activities circles around the customers. This process is the answer to some crucial questions: “Where, when, and how their consumer wants to communicate with the business.”
Why Customers Are Essential In Marketing
It is said that: “Marketing starts with a consumer and ends with a consumer.”
At a fundamental level, the sentence can understand that marketing is the process of understanding your customers, and building and maintaining relationships with them. A business remains profitable and valuable buyers by marketing. It means that you need to fully understand the problems and concerns of the customers so that you can help them to solve it. And, marketing is an ongoing process to contact with the target market.
In another perspective, the sentence claims that the customer is the priority. Although the idea to put your customers first is not a new idea, it is still challenging for businesses to adapt to the ever-changing demand from them.
However, not all consumers should be targeted. The store needs to balance between the value for the client and creating profits for your own. Only certain groups will be aimed to maximize the firm’s revenue and minimize cost. It means that all the marketing strategies and tactics will be created through an understanding of the customers and how they can work well with each other. Therefore, when your business accidentally chooses a different group of customers, it will create a difference.
That is the reason why a marketer at the beginning stage will have to invest in customer research to increase the success rate of your marketing strategy. They will be the ones who generate demand for your product/service. All of your tactics and strategy will be created based on the behavior of the customers.
How Does Marketing Process Work?
The marketing process comprises 4 stages which are:
Brainstorming
The marketing relates to forming many ideals to promote the product/ service. All your creativity will be poured ỉn to find answers for questions like what are you going to sell, how many options are provided, and how it will be packaged and delivered to customers.
Create Research And Test
Before promoting new products with your unique idea, it is smart to move to see research and testing your ideas to a small group of potential consumers. The marketing department usually examines new product concepts with a focus group to check how they react with the latest products along with its promoting ideas and the appropriate price to set. For small stores, businesses can naturally be testing their new ideas with their familiars, which can create positive results as well. Besides, you need to dig deeper and analyze your rival on the market. The information gathered from competitors can help you decide the price and position your brand in the real market.
If you have an e-commerce store and marketing research is a luxury that you cannot afford, free tools online can help you to measure the effectiveness of your inbound marketing.
Advertising
The information from the research will be your clue to form an effective advertising campaign. Campaigns are included in different methods of advertising, such as media, events, direct advertising, paid partnership campaign, referral marketing, public relations, internet advertising, social media, etc. Besides, there is a unique way to advertise which is hiring influencers. It is best to find the place where they mostly access for entertainment to show your advertising campaign.
Right before you spend your investment in advertising, it is crucial for you to set criteria to assess the effectiveness of your advertising campaign. Close supervision will be helpful for future campaigns. This is especially important when it comes to digital marketing. Great examples are digital marketing companies in Canada doing a lot of advertising with focus on getting local customers and trust. However, digital marketing can be expensive so setting clear goals and budgets is crucial for success.
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Selling
After planning for promoting, you need to choose where and how you can sell the product to the customers. You can decide to sell locally, nationally, or even internationally, and some companies only sell their products or services online. For example, a retail business can choose an easy to spot location with a dense population or decide to sell online with an eCommerce site or a multi-vendor site to ease the cost of hiring a position. professional web design is always recommended if you are going to sell your products online.
What Is Marketing Mix?
The goal of marketing is to place the right product in the right place, at the right price, at the right time. If you left one of these off the mark, your marketing plans for products could be a flop, which will cost the company significantly.
Therefore, 4Ps and marketing mix are spread by Neil Borden in the year 1950. The marketing has to ensure all the 4 criteria are considered for optimization to generate the essential mix to market the product price. As a result, the individual analysis will be created to help you create the marketing mix which will satisfy the customers and the sellers.
- Price
The price refers to the value the business has to invest in a product. Product pricing is mostly affected by the production cost, the group of customers, the marketability to pay, supply and demand, and other direct or indirect factors. The prices should be suitable so that customers can be willing to purchase. Price strategy is essential for you to consider because it can make a visible difference to differentiate and enhance your products. Also, you need to choose a specific channel for your stores. For example, when you decide to go online, you need to choose the right channel like drop shipping for your store to approach reasonable pricing.
- Product
This “P” referring to the actual product which will be sold. It is essential that it fulfills a specific need of the customers and stand out from other competitors. Before it can be released into the market, stores should prepare a suitable campaign, and you should understand what products are being sold, how it uniques when comparing to other competitors, whether it is possible to pair it with a product line, and what can be its likely substitute items on the market.
- Place
For different businesses, they will require a different location. It can be a physical store, online, or both. For instance, the retailers would invest in a premium location to increase exposure to as many customers as possible. Every decision you made for the location will affect the whole marketing process.
- Promotion
Promotion is tactics that apply in a short-term purchase to encourage customers to purchase more. These tactics can be created with advertising methods to accelerate their interest in the store products/ services. Besides advertisement, it also includes direct marketing, consumer schemes, contest, and prizes.
Overall, by assessing the role of each P, you can find the critical optimization that needs to be added to the tactics as well as marketing strategies, If the 4P’s analysis and Marketing Mix are appropriately utilized, stores can increase the effectiveness of the marketing strategy.
Modern Marketing
We can be acknowledged that the golden age of online business begins, based on the statistic of Statista in 2017, there are 40% of internet users in the US purchase item regularly each month. It is estimated that online sales are going to increase to grow from $504 billion to $735 billion in the year 2023.
Therefore, you need to take into consideration the new trend of the consumers and starts to utilize online tools such as online advertising, social media, and appealing marketing campaign on your store sites.
Final Words
I hope that the definition and 4Ps of marketing have helped you to understand what is marketing in general, including its purpose and how to apply it accordingly. The marketing relates to all activities in your business. Therefore, you need to use marketing properly. The business operation can run smoothly and eventually increase success to nourish your brand.
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