Marketing is far more than advertising or selling. We all participate in marketing efforts – daily. Consumers are involved in thousands of marketing decisions today. However, this doesn’t mean it will be easy to implement a good marketing strategy into your business – to reach and influence your consumers.

Define Marketing

The AMA (American Association of Marketing) defines marketing as “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.”

Others have defined marketing as the activity of creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.

Either way, you define marketing, it can teach consumers why they should do business with you over your competitors. In short, it’s a form of persuasive communication.

Marketing includes but is not limited to creating the product or service, identifying who will likely purchase it – also known as your target market, and, lastly, promoting your products and services. There are two primary objectives to marketing seeks:

1. Discover the needs and wants of prospective consumers
2. Satisfy Consumer Needs

Consumers don’t always know or may not describe what they need or want. Therefore, part of a marketer’s objective is to discover these needs and wants to satisfy this need and want. While satisfying every need and want of your consumers sounds great, it’s not always the best approach in hindsight. Therefore you must concentrate your strategy around a specific group of potential consumers or target market. As a result, when executed effectively, marketing can shape your consumer’s wants and influence what they purchase. These objectives can then develop a marketing plan to reach your consumers.

Marketing Mix

Achieving the objectives mentioned above also involves the four marketing mix factors that your business will largely control. To develop an effective marketing mix, you or your marketer should know how to analyze and combine these elements to form an effective marketing program and strategy.

1. Product: Your product (or service) should fill a gap in the marketplace to satisfy the consumer’s needs.
2. Price: What is the exchange for the product (or service) that is reasonable but not so high that competition can come in to compete for market share?
3. Promotion: The information you give your consumers through targeted resources such as email, social media, website, advertisements in print and online, etc. – to generate interest and convert them into paying customers.
4. Place: How and where you plan to sell your goods or services. This could be an online storefront or a brick-and-mortar location.

While your organization can control these factors, there will always be additional forces in one shape or another that are beyond your control. For example, the COVID-19 pandemic. These are environmental forces involving social, economic, technological, competitive, and regulatory forces. As we’ve seen in the past year, these forces can serve as accelerators or brakes to your marketing plan and efforts. If there is one thing we’ve learned from a pandemic can uproot life with little to no warning. However, having a plan as to how to handle hardships will help.

The Big Picture

There are endless ways to promote your business – products and/or services. What tactic(s) you use ultimately is your decision. And with having your objectives nailed down in conjunction with your marketing mix defined, the next step is to determine which form(s) of marketing is best for your business. As a friendly reminder, just because a customer has made a purchase, your marketing should not end. Why? It would be best if you continued targeting existing customers to ensure they continue doing business with you and, as a result, will create loyalty.

I hope this brief overview of what marketing is helps you understand its importance. Marketing can crossover with all areas of a business, so you must understand how to use marketing to increase your business’s efficiency and success.

If you need more help, let K M D Marketing and Design take a look at your marketing strategy to make more recommendations.