What Is Marketing? The Fundamentals Every Marketer Needs To Know

The case can be made that a business will only ever be as successful as its marketing strategy. A business may provide the best service in town, but if nobody knows about it, the company will never be able to turn a profit and sustain itself.

Marketing raises awareness among consumers of a business’s goods and services, and this involves much more than aimlessly displaying advertisements. Marketing has taken on new meaning as it continues to be innovated to keep up with our fast-paced society.

Figuring out the right marketing approach is often the sole difference between a successful and a failing business.

What Is Marketing?

To put it simply, marketing is a series of strategies and different actions that can produce profits for a business or company. With the help of marketing, businesses draw prospective customers’ attention to the product or services. Marketing also motivates prospective customers to take action and purchase these services and products.

Marketing encompasses a multitude of activities that create, communicate, deliver, and exchange different offers for clients in the hopes of increasing sales and other profitable actions on behalf of customers.

These concepts are commonly known as the marketing mix (the Ps of marketing) and the AIDA model (attention, interest, desire, action).

In practice, marketing often primarily focuses on creating relevant, valuable content and experiences to promote a business’s products to its ideal target audience. Marketing is responsible for attracting, converting, and retaining long-term, successful customers. This means marketing influences all areas of the sales funnel.

Marketing not only creates awareness of the brand but also influences consumers to take action and make a purchase.

To easily analyze the fundamentals of marketing, we can break it down into the 4 Ps of marketing.

At a high level, marketing includes:

Understanding The Real Meaning Of Marketing

To further understand this complex promotional process, let’s take a few steps back and break down how marketing is defined.

Marketing (noun): The sum of all activities including advertising, shipping, storing, and selling that initiates the transfer of goods and services from the producer to the consumer.

To market (verb): To execute activities that encourage a consumer to purchase a product.

Mercari (Latin origin): “To deal in; to buy; to trade.”

Let’s break this down even further.

Marketing seeks to 1) drive profitable customer action by 2) reaching a defined target audience with 3) information they find important and valuable. Engaging these audiences with stimulating content allows them to 4) discover brands, products, and solutions. Promoting this “aha” moment allows the customer to recognize how their lives can be improved by investing in the brand’s product.

What Are 4 Definitions Of Marketing From Experts?

Definition #1

Definition #2

The meaning of marketing is to pique the interest of potential customers and get them excited about a product. This excitement will initiate a purchase and may also result in the customer spreading the word about the product.

If a campaign can capture the attention of one customer in the target audience, chances are they will have friends or colleagues within the same demographic and will share their excitement with these other ideal customers. This can cause a ripple effect, and the business is essentially rewarded with free marketing for their product through word-of-mouth advertising.

Referrals are a powerful form of advertising as potential customers are able to count on real-life experiences from people they trust. When a company is able to build brand loyalty, they are able to grow exponentially by letting their existing customers provide powerful secondary marketing.

Definition #3

Marketers are essentially salespeople, and this may bring about a slew of negative connotations. Harsh words such as slimy, greedy, or scam-artist are often used to describe those in sales. The general public often believes that people in this line of work are only interested in benefiting themselves.

However, Seth Godin argues that marketing requires empathy and a deep understanding of the audience’s problems.

Marketing that only serves to create hype around a product will come off as inauthentic, and many of today’s consumers are skeptical when introduced to new products, to begin with.

In order to get past these apprehensions and earn a customer’s trust, the marketing team must have a legitimate interest in their customers’ struggles. Consumers want to believe that a brand is genuinely vested in them and will be on their side to help them achieve their dreams.

Definition #4

People in today’s society are bombarded with marketing in all different forms. Sometimes it’s obvious, like when passing dozens of billboards on a highway, but other times it’s more discrete and strategic. Whether it’s a Facebook ad for a new grill that pops up after leaving Home Depot, or companies offering a free product just for subscribing to their email list, innovations in technology have practically made our lives one continuous commercial.

A consumer’s brain can only retain so much information, and with advertisements flooding our minds from all directions, businesses need to be sure they convey a message that they want to be remembered by.

The opportunity to capture the attention of a potential customer is rare and will be short-lived, so it’s important to make an impression that lasts beyond the advertisement.

What Is B2B Marketing?

The valuables being delivered may either be items that are resold by the buying business, or services that can help the company run more efficiently.

The target audience in business-to-business marketing will often be the head decision-makers of the company. B2B marketing typically has a more difficult barrier to entry to reach the target audience than other forms of marketing.

For example, when cold calling a business to market services, the business owner will rarely be the person who picks up the phone. Leaving a message for the owner puts the fate of the marketing efforts in the hands of an employee who is not nearly as concerned about the campaign’s goals. Even if the appropriate message does get delivered, business owners are extremely busy and get swarmed by marketing calls and emails daily.

Therefore, it’s imperative marketers put together innovative marketing strategies that grab the attention of decision-makers and separate their product or service from the rest of the pack.

What Makes A Good B2B Marketing Plan?

One of the primary focuses of B2B marketing involves another acronym known as ROI, which stands for return on investment. For a majority of businesses, their main objective is making money.

An effective B2B marketing strategy will be able to convince decision-makers in the business that investment into their goods or services will generate more income and improve the business’ bottom line.

Pain Points In Marketing Meaning

Aside from promising to improve finances, a successful B2B marketing plan will be able to uncover the pain points that a business owner or stakeholder has.

For example, let’s pretend a company that answers calls and schedules appointments for small businesses is marketing to a local fence contractor.

This pitch identifies the pain point and paints the picture of a brighter future. The marketer not only promises to generate more revenue but explains how their service will be able to provide that, and gives specific numbers to trigger the imagination of the business owner.

It demonstrates how unanswered phone calls directly correlate to the owner’s pain point of being unable to spend more time with their family and then further exhibits how their service is the solution to resolving this issue.

Focus On Profits

One can certainly make the argument that B2B marketing is the hardest form of marketing as business owners are typically aware of the usual sales tactics that marketers attempt.

After all, business owners have to apply those same strategies to make sales to their own customers.

This is why it’s best to avoid the fluff and get straight to the bottom line of how the products offered will provide value.

Decision-makers of a business care less about the complex features of a product and more about whether or not it will make them money.

What Is B2C Marketing?

Clearly, the target market can vary significantly in B2C marketing, which is why market research to determine the ideal demographic is essential.

In contrast to B2B marketing, B2C purchases are often more impulsive. Typical consumers aren’t analyzing how a product will affect their bottom line, nor are they having in-depth discussions with others over how the product will impact their life.

The Best B2C Marketing Strategy

All marketing strategies should revolve around solving a problem, and B2C marketing typically promises to provide immediate solutions.

Business owners need to be shown how a product can bring their company value, but they typically understand that their purchase is an investment and have their sights set on long-term outcomes and benefits. With B2C selling, buyers are typically searching for products that solve a problem as quickly as possible.

The Power Of Emotional Marketing

With less research and more spontaneous purchases, marketers have a much smaller opportunity to prove the effectiveness of their products. This is why B2C marketing aims to trigger an emotion that will elicit an immediate response from consumers.

Let’s look at some possible real-life examples of how this is accomplished.

While business owners look at ROI from a financial perspective, the average consumer bases their ROI on the positive emotions that the purchase will give them, or perhaps the negative emotions if they don’t make the purchase.

Advertisements that can trigger these emotional responses have a greater chance at influencing their target audience and converting the sale.

What Is The Best Definition Of Marketing?

While there may be several different forms, all strategies have the same common goals in mind.

Identify the ideal customer, demonstrate how to solve their problems, and develop customer loyalty to keep them coming back for years and years to come.

What Does Marketing Do?

When marketing is strategic, its activities align with a cohesive vision. Marketers often create content and experiences with the goal of influencing lead indicators of profitable customer action.

1. Types Of Marketing: Marketers leverage many different methodologies to influence profitable customer action across the marketing funnel, including approaches for attracting, converting, and retaining customers. For example, marketers likely have several strategies to influence action across the marketing funnel, such as a search engine optimization marketing strategy to acquire website visitors, an email marketing strategy to nurture subscribers toward purchases, and a customer marketing strategy to onboard and retain customers.
2. Marketing Tactics: Marketers leverage tactics as the actual strategic actions that unify messaging and direct content creation. For example, marketers often publish case studies as part of a product marketing strategy that could take many content formats, such as videos, landing pages, or social media messages.
3. Marketing Channels: Marketers share messages and content to support their tactics and strategies via marketing channels. Channels include search engine results pages, social media networks, email inboxes, and more. Marketers must become experts in delivering the right message to the right audience at the right time via the marketing channels that have the greatest likelihood of influencing their goals.
4. Marketing Content: Marketers create and publish assets and materials that provide relevant, valuable information for their audiences. Content is often part of a tactic that is included in a specific marketing strategy and delivered through a strategically chosen channel. For example, a marketer may create an ad (content) that aligns with a product launch (tactic) that supports a product marketing strategy (strategy) and is published in a magazine (channel).
5. Marketing Collateral: Marketers also create sales collateral, which is a genre of content that closely aligns with deep-funnel messaging meant to enable sales teams to land and expand deals.

References

1. 1. Baer, J., & Naslund, A. (2011). The now revolution: 7 moves to transform your business to a faster, smarter, and more social. Wiley.
   2. Godin, S. (2019). This is marketing: You can’t be seen until you learn to see. Essay, Penguin Business.
   3. Jobs, S. (n.d.). Launch of Apple “Think Differently” Campaign – 1997. Speech.

This piece was published February 22, 2022. The definition of marketing was revised December 2022 to align with new understanding of types of marketing, types of marketing strategies, marketing tactics, marketing channels, types of content, and marketing collateral.