Have you ever thought: What marketing is? How it works and how it applies to your business? Are you a Marketing NOOB?
This article will be breaking down exactly what marketing is, how it all works, and why it’s such an important, if not the most important element to business success.
Let’s get to it. let’s talk marketing, Have tried figuring out why people buy and act the way they do? How influencing and persuading essentially affect human behavior? Because, whether you have a business or not Marketing happens pretty much every day.
Any time you try to convince friends or family to see a certain movie or eat at any restaurant or not or basically try to convince them to do anything, Marketing is happening.
Also, marketing is really important to understand, because you are constantly being marketed to by everyone from everywhere. From something as simple as someone trying to sell you a pair of shoes to something a lot bigger, like buying a new house or moving across the country or even changing careers. All of this requires the use of marketing.
So, with all that said, let’s dive into it. But first, let’s cover what marketing is not, so once we’ve got that clear, we can cover exactly what it is. Many people don’t really have a clear picture of exactly what marketing is so people fell prey to the notion that marketing is advertising. Well, in reality, marketing isn’t advertising but advertising is marketing.
Let me explain. Basically, marketing is a major business function that’s made up of a bunch of other parts, one of which of course is advertising, but there’s also a ton others like PR, market research, social media, content marketing, search engine marketing or search engine optimization, pricing, and pricing psychology, copywriting and quite a few more. So, saying that marketing is just advertising and kind of like saying that finance is just taxes or HR is just hiring people or legal is just not getting sued. Sure, these are all important but they are just one piece of the entire puzzle.
This is why if you’re just getting started in, marketing can seem pretty overwhelming which is why my suggestion is to find an area that you find interesting, fascinating, like say social media or content marketing, start there really get some roots and branch out later.
Alright, so now that we’ve got that covered, let’s talk about what exactly is marketing? Well, you know now that marketing is made up of a plethora of different subsegments things like content marketing, email marketing, and social media, all the things we talked about. But what exactly is the nature of marketing?
Well, one of the first things you learn in any first-year marketing course is the four P´s of marketing: product, price, place, and promotion. The product being the details around whatever product or service is being sold. Price being the price. The place is where the products being sold and promotion. Promotion is essentially how you’re gonna sell more of the product and what you’re gonna do to get the word out about your service and while all of that is accurate and true and the four P´s do make up a part of marketing, well, I prefer a simpler, easier to understand definition.
” Marketing in its most basic sense is communicating value to your customers. ”
It’s essentially answering the question of your customers “Why should I care?” Marketing helps people solve their problems by clearly defining and delivering solutions and really explaining the benefits of the solution so they can get better results. Marketing is about connecting with people, understanding their pains and their problems, and their frustrations, making them feel understood so that you can position your business as the solution to their problems and essentially just make them feel better and marketing is a really powerful force. As anyone that’s been in business for any length of time can tell you, it’s not always the best product or service that wins, in fact, it rarely is, rather it’s the product or service with the best marketing. Like it or not, that’s just kind of how it works which is why having good marketing is just so important.
So my favorite definition of marketing is that ” its communicating value to your customers” but there’s another side entirely that is rarely talked about but still equally powerful and that’s ” creating value for your customers “. You see, marketing can create value and your marketing in and of itself can be valuable. An example could be a blog post that helps someone out, even before any money has changed hands or an advertisement someone sees that brightens their day and makes them laugh whether they choose to buy or not or the way that a product or service is delivered, the packaging let’s say which is so luxurious and over-the-top that it makes the customer feel special just for having purchased it.
You see, economics assumes that people make buying decisions rationally, logically, and with perfect information but this is rarely, pretty much never the case. We as humans are emotional, often highly illogical, and rarely have the full set of facts when making any decision, which explains why marketing is so important and so powerful. After all, if we made all of our purchasing decisions based solely on logic and utility and the value we would get from these products, well, the entire luxury goods market wouldn’t even exist but not all marketing is created equal.
You see, when it comes to marketing, like when it comes to pretty much anything, there’s good marketing and there’s bad marketing. Bad marketing is all of the reasons that marketing gets such a bad reputation. It’s that hype, spammy, over-the-top sleazy sales icky kind of marketing that we all know we’ve all seen and nobody likes. It’s the stuff that looks cheap, makes people feel dirty, even just looking at it, and promotes bad products or bad services that really helps nobody. It’s the fake countdown timers you sometimes see on websites the going-out-of-business sales that never end and the pushy promotion of useless products. That’s bad marketing. Good marketing, on the other hand, helps customers achieve their goals, makes them feel better about themselves, and has the power to truly change the world. So my question to you is: What kind of marketer do you want to be? That was a rhetorical question.
Hope you enjoyed reading it. Do check Steve Jobs: “To Me, Marketing Is About Values” video.
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