Marketing

What Is Marketing

Marketing is the process of getting potential clients or customers interested in your

 products and services. The keyword in this definition is "process." Marketing involves researching, promoting, selling, and distributing your products or services. 

This discipline centers on the study of market and consumer behaviors and it analyzes the commercial management of companies in order to attract, acquire, and retain customers by satisfying their wants and needs and instilling brand loyalty.

Definition of Marketing

The definition of marketing is the action or business of promoting and selling products or services, including market research and advertising. Today, marketing is something that every company and organization must implement in its growth strategy. Many companies use marketing techniques to achieve their goals without even realizing it, as they work to promote themselves and increase sales of their product or service. These days, marketing is one of the key aspects of businesses.

People often do not know exactly what marketing is and, when asked, they define it as selling or advertising. While these answers are not wrong, they are only a part of marketing. There are many other aspects to marketing like product distribution, promotion, designing and creating materials like landing pages and social media content, improving customer experience, doing market research, establishing market segments, and much more. Marketing is very broad and encompasses all the strategies that help a company, brand, or individual achieve its objectives. 

• Product. 
• Having a product is key and is the root of all things marketing. A product could be anything that a company offers consumers to satisfy a need. The best thing to do is to decide on your product or service based both on the needs and motivations of consumers and how the product would benefit the consumer, rather than on the object’s physical characteristics or attributes.
• Place. 
• Strategic merchandising locations can be anything from an online store to a channel of physical stores across multiple towns or countries. The goal of the distribution strategy is to enable potential clients to have easy access to your products/services as well as offer a good experience throughout the purchasing process.  
• Price.
• How you price your products and services is an extremely important part of the marketing strategy. This factor affects other factors such as:
• • The margin you hope to obtain.
  • What target market do you want to appeal to and what purchasing power do your consumers have? Do you want to enter the luxury market or the mass market?
  • The company's financial goals.
  • How does the competition price their products and what possible product substitutes are there?
  • Trends and fads.
  • Increasing your price in order to give a better perception of quality.
• Promotion. 
• This refers to all the marketing and communication that is done in order to showcase the benefits of your product or service within the market. This is how you increase sales.

Marketing Do for Your Business

Raising Brand Awareness

This is important because it gets people acquainted with your brand and the products or services you provide. It also makes you memorable to customers who can begin to trust your brand, become loyal clients, and tell their network about you.

 

Generating Traffic

Growing the number of visitors to your site means getting more qualified leads (lead scoring can help determine this) and ultimately increasing your sales. An effective marketing strategy will help you through this process. 

 

Increasing Revenue

Every business that wants to increase its sales and marketing can help achieve this goal through a variety of strategies like optimizing your website and SEO, creating email campaigns, performing A/B tests to pinpoint the best strategy for you, and much more.

 

Building Trust in Your Brand

Creating a high level of trust in your brand leads to customer loyalty and repeat purchases. This not only increases revenue but also leads to great reviews both online and by word of mouth, which is still one of the most effective types of promotion.

 

Tracking Your Metrics

Metrics are incredibly helpful when it comes to creating your marketing strategy. They not only drive the strategy and help track its progress but also inform what can be adapted or adjusted to continually optimize your campaigns.

Different Marketing Strategies 

Marketing is not just one single strategy, but rather a combination of many different techniques and tactics. Below we've listed some essential marketing strategies that you should know about. Click on the red links to learn more about each of these strategies. 

• Marketing Plan 
• Discover what a marketing plan is, why you need to design one, and the keys to creating a strong plan. Without a marketing plan, a company or brand can’t reach its goals.
• Digital Marketing
•  Digital marketing is the discipline of marketing that focuses on developing a strategy solely within the digital environment.
• Direct Marketing
•  Direct marketing is a type of campaign based on direct, two-way communication that seeks to trigger a result from a specific audience.
• Email Marketing
• Email marketing is one of the most profitable and effective techniques in terms of return. Naturally, it consists of sending emails to your audience, but make sure to define your segments well in order to be effective.
• Mobile Marketing
• Mobile marketing is a broad concept that brings together all marketing campaigns and actions focused exclusively on mobile platforms & applications (i.e. smartphones and tablets).
• Viral Marketing
• Having something go viral is every company’s dream. Viral Marketing spreads from one person to the next and is capable of going incredibly far incredibly fast
• Performance Marketing
• Performance marketing is a methodology that applies various marketing methods and techniques and guarantees advertisers that they only have to pay for achieved results.

• Inbound Marketing

• This methodology focuses on creating valuable content to attract qualified web traffic and work towards the final sale.

Marketing Objectives

1. Increase brand awareness among the target audience.

2.  With new brands, their primary objective is to increase brand awareness and visibility. To do this, you have to define your marketing actions and campaigns to let consumers know of the products and services you provide. 

3. Increase market share. 

4. The existing competition in the market will determine how much market share your brand is able to acquire. The objective isn't always to be the best, but to find a good position in the market and to be considered as a reference for a segment of the market. 

5. Launching a new product. 

6. The product or service you are launching must always be created to fill consumers' pain points. Additionally, you must choose a launch strategy and price. 

7. Improve ROI. 

8. Return on investment is one of the most important marketing metrics as it is a direct indicator of how well a campaign is performing. 

9. Introduce the company into new international or local markets.

10.  Challenge your brand to expand into new local or international markets. 

11. Increase business profits. 

12. You should aim to eventually increase business profits for your company with your marketing plan. 

13. Optimize the conversion funnel. 

14. Optimize each stage of the funnel by creating retargeting strategies for customers who have abandoned their carts during the checkout process. 

15. Capture new leads. 

16. Brands, especially when they are new, don't have a loyal customer base. It takes time to build a solid customer database. That's why it's important to continually put effort into capturing new leads that could eventually turn into paying customers. 

17. Customer loyalty. 

18. Boosting loyalty marketing is a great example of a marketing objective. 

19. Increase sales. 

20. This is perhaps the most obvious marketing objective and the top priority for most marketing departments.

Ideal Qualities for Digital Marketing 

1. Forward-looking.

2. Today's marketer must be prepared to do his or her best in an ever-changing environment, learn new skills, and have the foresight to know what's coming. 

3. Curious. 

4. A good marketer doesn't stick with what he or she already knows but is always trying to go one step further. He or she must be passionate about new trends and be willing to try new ideas.

5. Versatile. 

6. Being an expert in online marketing is impossible as there are many skills involved. Even so, a good marketer must be able to understand the digital environment, master the tools, and possess analytical skills. 

7. Able to collaborate. 

8. Teamwork is essential in the world of marketing. 78% of professionals believe that it is the most important trait. 

9. Consumer-centric. 

10. Brand-focused marketing is a thing of the past. Today, what matters is knowing consumers perfectly and knowing how to adapt to their needs.

Important Digital Marketing Skills

1. Attract and retain customers through a digital strategy. 

2. Have a business strategy aimed at promoting digital innovation.

3. Have a specific customer relationship management strategy. 

4. Digital media has completely changed customer expectations and their relationships with brands, so a good marketer must be able to account for this shift.

5. Stay up to date with industry news and trends. 

6. You must be able to provide insights into the digital environment.

7. Coordinate and work as a team in digital environments.

8.  Collaboration is more important than ever to achieve objectives. A good marketer is a perfectly integrated member of the team, not a lone wolf.

9. Have a digital marketing plan. 

10. Align the customer experience with their moments of truth. 

11. Customer experience is one of the key pillars of marketing today. If you can identify customers' key moments, you will know how to reach them best. 

12. Share content in the cloud and on social networks. 

13. These two tools have changed the digital landscape in recent years, and any good digital marketer will know how to do both. 

14. Achieve good positioning for client sites. 

15. SEO and SEM knowledge is essential.

16. Obtain relevant information and process data. 

17. We have more information than ever, but without the ability to analyze and understand it, it is useless.

History of Marketing

Not too long ago, marketing mostly consisted of outbound marketing, which meant chasing potential customers with promotions without really knowing if that person was interested in purchasing. Thanks to the digital transformation and the rise of new communication channels, marketing has drastically changed over the years.

 To understand how marketing has changed, let’s take a look at this timeline HubSpot has assembled showcasing the innovations of this industry. 

1450-1900 

Printed Advertising 

• 1450,
•  Gutenberg invents the printing press. The world of books and mass copies is revolutionized.
• 1730, 
• the magazine emerges as a means of communication.
• 1741,
•  the first American magazine is published in Philadelphia.
• 1839,
•  posters become so popular that it becomes prohibited to put them in London properties.

 

1920-1949

 New Media

• 1922,
•  radio advertising begins.
• 1933, 
• more than half of the population in the United States (55.2%) has a radio in their home. 
• 1941, 
• television advertising begins. The first advertisement was for Bulova watches and reached 4,000 homes that had television.
• 1946, 
• more than 50% of the homes in the United States already had a telephone.

 

1950-1972:

 Marketing is Born and Grows

• 1954,
•  for the first time revenue from television advertising surpasses revenue from radio and magazine ads.
• Telemarketing grows as a means of contacting buyers directly. 
• 1972, 
• print media starts to become less popular 

 

1973-1994: 

The Digital Era Flourishes

• 1973,
•  Martin Cooper, a Motorola researcher, makes the first call through a cell phone.
• 1981, 
• IBM launches its first personal computer.
• 1984, 
• Apple introduces the new Macintosh. 
• 1990-1994,
•  major advances in 2G technology, which would lay the foundation for the future explosion of mobile TV.
• 1994, the first case of commercial spam through e-commerce is produced.

 

1995-2020: 

The Era of Search Engines and Social Media

• 1995, 
• the Yahoo! and Altavista search engines are born. 
• 1995-1997, 
• the concept of SEO is born.
• 1998,
•  Google and MSN launch new search engines.
• 1998, 
• the concept of blogging arises. By mid-2006, there are already 50 million blogs worldwide.
• 2003-2012, 
• the era of inbound marketing begins.
• 2003-2004, 
• three social networks are launched: LinkedIn, MySpace, and Facebook.
• 2005, 
• the first video is posted on YouTube
• 2006, 
• Twitter is born.
• 2009, 
• Google launches real-time searches.
• 2010, 
• 90% of all American households have a cell phone. Instagram is created in 
• October 10.Young people between the ages of 13 and 24 spend 13.7 hours on the Internet, compared to 13.6 hours watching television.
• 2011, 
• Snapchat is created, driving even more young users to their phones and fueling the social media app craze.
• 2012,
•  there are already 54.8 million tablet users.
• 2014,
•  the rise of influencer marketing begins. Users and brands alike begin to realize the power of social media users with large followings.Mrketing tools for Instagram and other platforms abound
• 2014,
•  for the first time ever mobile usage outweighs desktop usage. More users are checking social media, reading emails, and making purchases on their phone
• s. 
• 2015-2016,
•  big data and marketing automation are explored and used more robustly to advertise to users. 
• 2018, 
• video marketing continues to grow, especially with Instagram’s launch of IGTV. Video content is no longer just limited to YouTube and Facebook. 
• 2019-2020,
•  Move over millennials! Gen Z is the new focus and they have a hot new app: TikTok. 
  

It will be interesting to see where marketing continues to grow. With new world events, like the COVID-19 crisis of 2020 causing millions of people to stay in doors, social media and marketing trends are sure to change, and we’ll be right here to track them. 

Cyberclick’s

Marketing is any strategy or action which can help a company achieve its goals, increase its sales and profits, and/or has improved brand perception. Here at Cyberclick, we live and breathe marketing and advertising; it’s in our DNA! We are experts in attracting users to our client's websites or landing pages through marketing acquisition. Cyberclick is a performance marketing agency. We analyze each new project we get and, if we see it as viable, we can ensure certain results according to a client’s goals. You might be thinking, “what’s so special about performance marketing?” The special thing is that a client only pays when results are achieved.