Marketing is the set of actions that brands take:
- Attract new customers
- Keep your current clientele
- Promote recurring purchases
Alternatively, it may be as complex as a multi-channel, multi-touch content strategy that is distributed online.
Marketing is any action that entails consumer communication with the ultimate purpose of increasing income.
What Is Marketing’s Objective?
Contemporary businesses employ marketing strategies to set themselves apart from their rivals and increase sales.
To do this, marketers need to draw in new clients or hold onto their current clientele. This is based on where they are in the funnel for marketing. Making money by selling goods or services is nearly always the ultimate objective. Yet, marketing might aim for a variety of objectives, frequently at the same time.
Additionally, it helps to focus your marketing plan to break down the more general “grow revenue” aim into smaller, more targeted ones.
Your company’s long-term plan for self-promotion, reaching your target market, and converting leads into customers is called a strategy.
Awareness of Brands
Whether or whether customers purchase your goods or services, a higher level of brand awareness indicates that more people are aware of your business.
If your brand is more well-known, you will show up in “consideration sets” more frequently. When making a purchase, a buyer weighs these possibilities.
Because someone won’t purchase from you if they are unaware of your brand. That’s why the main objective of content marketing is to raise brand awareness.
Among the strategies to raise brand recognition are:
- Making the most of your social media presence
- Organizing competitions
- Producing useful material (such as free courses or ebooks)
- Generating favorable PR
Lead Creation
Attracting new clients and obtaining their contact information is the goal of lead generation (typically an email or phone number). In doing so, customers choose to receive sales and marketing communications from you and turn them into “leads.”
By doing this, you may divide up your audience and identify the people who are most likely to become clients.
Various strategies for generating leads are:
- To demonstrate the value you provide, provide free tools or trial periods for your service.
- Producing top-notch lead magnets—useful material that can only be accessed with contact information—
- Adding live chat to your website so potential customers may make inquiries
- Promoting glowing testimonials from satisfied clients to instill trust in potential clients
Purchasing
Bringing in and converting new clients is known as customer acquisition.
That is frequently equivalent to sales. However, in the context of free software tools and freemium applications, the acquisition may be centered around acquiring new free users.
For instance, 89% of respondents claim that seeing video content has persuaded them to purchase a good or service. Because of this, 96% of marketers view the media as an “important part” of their overall marketing plan.
Other acquisition tactics include:
- Establishing a referral program to reward existing clients for referring new ones
- Researching your target market to determine their top desires
- Giving a complimentary trial to demonstrate the worth of your offer
- Optimizing your website to give users an improved experience
Activation
Converting trial users into paying customers is the goal of customer activation. Particularly when selling to big business organizations, marketing, and sales frequently work together on this.
One activation event may be going to a trade exhibition in your industry, for instance. You may interact with potential clients here and promote signups.
Additional strategies for activation include as following:
- Adding quick video lessons to the knowledge base of your website helps keep visitors interested
- Sending emails with trial expiration dates to entice users to update before it’s too late
- Including social evidence on your website, such as testimonials, can establish credibility and trust
- Offering free products to encourage sign-ups
Retention
Retention is all about retaining current clients. Preventing client churn, or subscription cancellations, is crucial for subscription-based businesses.
Retention for transactional businesses—such as e-commerce brands—focuses on generating repeat business from past clients. While SaaS (subscription as a service) providers need to maintain active monthly or yearly user subscriptions to their goods.
Advertising vs. Marketing
Marketing is frequently used interchangeably with the phrase “advertising.” A paid promotion of your company, goods, or services is called advertising. Its disruptive nature sets it apart from conventional marketing strategies.
Advertisers provide their adverts to customers in a way that disrupts their current activities.
Traditional marketing uses radio, TV, and periodicals as platforms for advertisements. For the advertisements, the customer is not watching TV, listening to the radio, or reading magazines. The client experience is being disrupted by the advertisement.
Customers encounter advertisements on websites and social media in the digital age. The experience of reading the blog article or seeing the Instagram Story is interrupted.
Conversely, marketing consists of the brand’s actual blog post or Instagram Story. People are purposefully ingesting this stuff. Thus, nothing is being interrupted by it.
The Four Ps of Marketing
The four Ps framework describes how various company components interact with a marketing plan. They are Product, Pricing, Place, and Promotion.
It’s an age-old marketing tactic that continues to be effective.
Although it was developed in the middle of the 20th century for offline strategies, it is still applicable to internet marketing.
Product
Whether there is a market for the good or service that a business provides is the main concern here. These days, we refer to this as product-market fit.
Effective marketing teams concentrate on market research to comprehend the following when evaluating this four Ps principle:
- Which essential characteristics define your target audience?
- Which significant consumer demands does your product meet?
- What messaging appeals to and engages your target audience?
Pricing
Your marketing staff has to focus on rivals and try out various price strategies to implement this fourth Ps concept.
For transactional firms, the first step is to decide where you want to place your product (e.g., as a cheap choice or a premium one) in the market. Next, adjust prices to make them as affordable as possible for customers in that category.
If you charge too much, some people won’t be able to afford you. If your price is too cheap, you might be perceived as a subpar choice.
Additionally, brands need to decide whether pricing schemes—such as usage-based or per-user billing—work best for their goods and clientele.
Place
The “place” P is the location where clients locate you and make purchases.
For businesses with physical locations, this is crucial. McDonald’s and Starbucks are two excellent examples of brands.
Take Starbucks, for example.
The multinational coffee company selects locations in affluent areas with plenty of foot traffic using a data-driven methodology. The team will know there will be a sufficient number of customers who can purchase their items in this method.
In the context of contemporary marketing, businesses need to consider where and how they appear online. The obvious place to start is your company’s website.
However, you may also sell directly through social media platforms and online marketplaces (like eBay, Amazon, and Etsy) as an e-commerce business. That means that you can operate more than one internet business.
Promotion
The 14 various forms of marketing that we discussed before are included in “promotion.”
It involves choosing your channels of distribution, your techniques for connecting with them, and your messaging.