Marketing is the activities a company does to assist sales and promote the buying or selling of a product or service. Marketing helps create a demand for your products by getting potential clients interested in your products and services. When you are marketing, you are involved in understanding your customers and building relationships with them. Educating consumers on why they should choose your product or service over a competitor’s offerings is part of marketing.
The marketing mix you likely went over in school is known as “the 4 Ps.” These are product, pricing, place, and promotion.
These cover the main decisions you’ll have to make about promoting your products or services. There are many types of offline and online marketing. Offline marketing consists of print, broadcast, direct mail, outdoor, and telephone marketing.
Digital Marketing Deals With:
- Content marketing
- Search engine optimization
- Social media marketing like pay-per-click
- Search engine marketing
- Email marketing
- Retargeting
- Influencer and affiliate marketing
- Inbound marketing
- Marketing automation
- Website marketing
The trend in media ad spending has consistently shown digital marketing quickly increasing each year while offline marketing is slowly declining.
To Develop a Marketing Strategy You Need to:
- Identify your goals.
- Perform market research and identify your target market.
- Complete a situational analysis of the competitive landscape.
- Develop your story and what makes your products and services a better choice than the competition.
- Select the most effective marketing channels for your target market.
- Create a tactical implementation plan.
- Measure your key performance indicators and benchmarks to monitor strategy performance.
When marketing to target customers, remember each is at different stages in the market funnel when they think of your business. The market funnel stages start at awareness, then move to consideration, preference, action, loyalty, and lastly, advocacy. Advocacy is the highest level of customer engagement where customers promote you without you having to do anything. The more advocates your company has, the better.