What is Marketing?
In marketing, you use tools to convey your brand’s message to the public. Just as your products and services will change and evolve, so will your brand’s marketing output.
Marketing is the act of promoting the advantages of a company’s goods and services through a series of actions, it is a series of activities intended to explain the advantages of a business’s goods and services. In essence, marketing refers to the strategies you employ to communicate the value of your brand. Marketing will advance the fundamental tenets of your brand while addressing particular subsets of your target market. Marketers try to explain the advantages of their goods.
Marketing is vast. It can be heartfelt, funny, or serious. It can be any mix of text, keywords, photos, charts, graphs, and videos. Marketing will be performed by a variety of online and offline methods—some of the most common being:
- SEO
- Content Marketing
- Social Media Marketing
- Pay Per Click Marketing
- Mobile Marketing
- Television
- Radio
- Print Campaigns
As you implement your marketing campaign, you may try other methods of both online and offline marketing that may come and go. Although marketing methods change from year to year, or seasonally, there are many other options you may want to consider, your brand will always remain constant.
Developing and managing a successful marketing plan requires a business to first identify the message it wants to convey, as well as the target audience to whom it is intended.
How to strategize and implement marketing
The first thing to do is to read the subheading again and note the error, you do not implement marketing, you implement a marketing strategy. Then why did I write a wrong statement only to correct it in the next sentence? For fun, of course!
Sincerely speaking, the real reason I purposefully wrote the wrong words is because this is how most new entrepreneurs think and speak about marketing, and that is why the error could pass many business grammar tests.
Marketing consists of three fundamental tasks: research, strategy and implementation. One cannot function without the two others. While branding aims to evoke an emotion, marketing purports to elicit a reaction.
To run a successful marketing campaign, you need to, first, outline a plan that will manage everyone’s expectations and responsibilities, including those of your stakeholders, team members, and yourself.
Secondly, and this tends to get overlooked a lot, invest some time in researching your company and its nature, your potential customers and their needs, and your competitors and their strengths and weaknesses. It is important to include this in your marketing plan as well since it will take up a substantial amount of time.
Next, you need to formulate a strategy based on the information you gathered from your research. For those who will be drawing up marketing strategies for your bosses, please do not merely give your boss definitions of and recommendations about “hashtags”, and “social media”, he lives in the 21st century he knows and understands the significance of these terms, refrain from wasting his time reading and your time writing these frivolous explanations and incomprehensible suggestions, what that will, instead, inform him is that you do not know what a strategy is and you simply googled it, since google will never give you a bespoke strategy, he will ultimately think that you are lazy, and we all know how bosses love lazy employees. Essentially, you are suggesting he ought to map out how to utilize those intricacies, which is something you should have done, to begin with.
A strategy, rather, should be elaborate, it should detail how a business will reach prospective customers and turn them into customers. There are many high-level elements to a marketing strategy, such as a company’s value proposition, key branding messages, information on target audience segmentation, and many others.
You may segment your customers based on demography, psychography, behaviour and geography. It is in this strategy, although not exclusively, where you will decide whether you will cater to a niche market or a broader base.
In your strategy, you will decide whether to use digital or physical marketing or both and if the marketing will be organic or paid.
Further, you will also determine where your brand will appear, the tactics you will employ, and the marketing metrics that will be used to measure your performance there, and do a SWOT analysis.
Now for those hashtags, you should instead outline the hashtags, list them and take the best out of the list, plan how you post on your social media, what you post and how often.
Lastly, you should discuss the budget and build a workflow that outlines the timeline and delegations.