What is Marketing?
Marketing is often seen as the practice of promoting or selling a product through the use of advertising and direct sales. This is a rather simplistic view of marketing. Advertising is just one component of marketing, while sales is more of a result than a means of marketing.
Marketing is better understood as the overall effort to build a brand or business by generating awareness, top-of-mind recall, preference, affinity and loyalty for the brand and its products. The result of this is short and long term sales and revenue, which is the core objective for most businesses.
What does Marketing entail?
Purists tend to split Marketing, Branding and Communications/Public Relations into separate fields. This works well in theory, especially if you're trying to understand the nuances of each field. However, it is common for corporations in the real world to use Marketing as an umbrella, under which Branding and Public Relations are key components. The logic behind this is that every communication and branding effort should ladder up to driving profitability for the business, which is the ultimate goal of Marketing.
Internal vs External Marketing
It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that Marketing is purely focused on acquiring new customers. To avoid this, it can help to divide marketing strategies into Internal and External Marketing. This way, the most appropriate strategies can be formed according to the business objective and key audiences.
Why is Marketing important?
Very simply put, marketing is essential for business growth and longevity. You might be able to run a business and survive on a few loyal customers without any marketing efforts, but in order to grow, you need more revenue, which means more sales, and that often means you need more customers. To achieve this, you need a marketing strategy.
Yes, you can rely on the quality of your product alone to drive word of mouth publicity (which is a form of marketing), but in this world of excess and shrinking attention spans, it is easy for your business to become forgotten, or old news.
You do not need a big budget for marketing. There are several marketing strategies and tactics you can employ that need minimal expenditure. Build a brand logo and story people will remember, be on social media, use your product packaging to deliver a message, start a loyalty and referral program to get new and return customers, deliver a product and service that people love!
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