After you create a new product, you need to put some marketing efforts to sell it successfully. This type of activity is not synonymous with PR or advertising. It can take place both online and offline. From this article, you'll get to know what the term "marketing" means and how to make the most of it. This information should come in handy for companies of any size and industry.
What Is Marketing?
The essence of marketing is messaging. Businesses create messages to inspire people to buy their goods or services and spread them through the channels that allow them to achieve their goals. Companies generate content to showcase the competitive edges of their products, strengthen brand loyalty and ultimately maximize their revenue. Plus, the process includes research that you should carry out before investing any time, effort and funds in marketing activities.
When launching a marketing campaign for a certain product, you should do the following:
-
Ask yourself where, when and how your target audience would like to communicate with your business
-
Study online shopping habits of your potential customers
-
Send out surveys
-
Conduct focus groups
-
Keep researching and analyzing continuously
At first sight, it might seem that the definition of marketing is a bit too broad. But once you start acting, your team will quickly understand their sphere of responsibility and will learn how to adapt their strategies to different types of products.
Modern marketing was invented in the 1950s. Back then, businesses began to spread the word about their products in printed media. In the next decades, brands embraced the opportunities of TV and the Internet. Marketing became crucial for all aspects of a business, including product development, distribution methods, sales and advertising.
Today, you might want to try the following types of marketing:
-
Internet marketing. The pioneer of this sphere was the team behind the Excedrin medication. It was allegedly the first product whose marketing campaign took place online. Today, nearly any type of your business online presence can be considered as Internet marketing.
-
Search Engine Optimization (SEO). You optimize the content on your website to make the site appear on the first page with search engine results. When consumers start searching for goods or services that satisfy their needs, they will come across the link to your website even if they have never heard about you before.
-
Search Engine Marketing. It differs from SEO in the following aspect: you can pay a search engine to place links to your website on top of search results. Such an approach is also known as pay-per-click (PPC).
-
Blog Marketing. You can launch a blog where you would share industry analytics, real-life cases from your own company and other insightful information that other companies from your sector will appreciate. Or, you can target your blog at consumers and share valuable recommendations with them. To reach the widest possible audience, your blog should contain information that is interesting to many market participants and not only your corporate news.
-
Social Media Marketing. You can spread messages about your product on any social networking platform that your target audience might use. Influencer marketing also belongs to this category — but you can also collaborate with influencers outside socnets.
-
Video Marketing. This sphere goes far beyond creating video commercials. You can generate educational content for your customers, tutorials, entertaining videos and so on.
-
Print Marketing. It has by no means become obsolete! To remain profitable, top printed media do thorough research on their audience. Your task is to identify media that cater to people with the same demographics as the target audience of your product. You might want to sponsor articles and photography, share your expert opinion with journalists or suggest other formats of collaboration.
Depending on the specifics of your product and the tastes of your target audience, you might want to use all of these types of marketing or just a few of them.
To streamline your marketing workflows and raise their efficiency, you might want to use dedicated software, such as Bitrix24. This powerful and versatile product features a CRM, an in-built contact center, product and project management tools, scheduling instruments and many other useful functions. It is available in cloud, on-premise and mobile formats and is a firm favorite of over 10 million companies from all regions of the world.
Marketing and Advertising
The notion of marketing is much broader than advertising. The former includes the following types of activity:
-
Product development
-
Market research
-
Product distribution
-
Sales strategy
-
Public relations
-
Customer support
Marketing takes place at all stages of a business's selling journey. Typically, it involves multiple channels and platforms. Marketing teams strive to boost brand awareness and expand the customer base. They identify the demographics of their target audience and detect the best ways of communicating with it.
Advertising is just one component of marketing. It enables marketing teams to increase brand recognition — but to achieve more impressive results, you should combine it with other activities.
Let's analyze an example. Imagine that your business starts to manufacture a brand new shampoo for dogs. You need to inform consumers about this product and motivate them to purchase it. You decide to communicate with your audience through your company's website, TikTok, Instagram and Google. You rely on these channels to generate leads and you take the following measures:
-
Share the detailed information on the shampoo on your website
-
Make videos for TikTok and Instagram to let your audience see how pets react to your shampoo
-
Invests in a series of sponsored search results on Google to direct traffic to the website
Depending on the structure of your business, you can either create a dedicated page on the shampoo on your company's main website or build a separate site for this product.
All the efforts that you put in can be classified as marketing. You selected the appropriate channels, formulated a message and delivered it.
As for the advertising, in this case, it takes place on Instagram, Tiktok and Google. You pay Google to display the ad of your shampoo. Creating content for TikTok and Instagram cannot be characterized as classic advertising — but you can grow a following on these social media who will be interested in regularly seeing product announcements from you.
The 4 Ps of Marketing
In the 1960s, E. Jerome McCarthy singled out the 4 Ps of marketing — and this approach remains relevant until now.
Product
You shouldn't launch a product simply because you know how to produce it. Instead, you should carry out thorough market research and find answers to the following questions:
-
Is there a demand for your product?
-
Which alternatives to your product are already present on the market?
-
How can you modify your product to make it more attractive for consumers?
-
What are the demographics of your target audience?
-
Which platforms and channels should you use to promote your product?
Then, you should ask focus groups to share their opinions on your product and analyze what they say.
Price
To find out how much the consumers will be ready to pay for your product, you can resort to two techniques:
Most likely, you won't be able to set a much lower price than your competitors because you would fail to make good revenue. But you might consider offering various modifications of your product, each with its own price tag.
Place
You might want to sell your product online, or offline, or using both variants. You might want to distribute it locally, nationally or internationally. You can rely on your shop and website as well as resources that belong to third parties (chain stores, online marketplaces and so on).
When comparing various places where you could sell your product, you should ask yourself the following questions:
-
Which places attract the most your target audience?
-
Which ones offer the best conditions?
-
Which ones are the most and the least popular among your competitors?
-
Where you'll be able to get the highest revenues?
When signing contracts with third parties, you should make sure that their conditions are flexible enough. You should be able to stop the supplies with no or minimum penalties if you realize that a certain platform fails to meet your expectations.
Promotion
The term "promotion" might denote an ad, a discount, a PR campaign or an event — anything you do to inspire your potential customers for the purchase. Get creative, follow industry trends and experiment!
Final Thoughts
Hopefully, you found this article informative and now you better understand how to define marketing. To motivate customers to purchase your product, you might rely on Internet marketing, search engine marketing and optimization, blog marketing, social media marketing, print marketing and video marketing. To achieve the best possible results, you should focus on four important P's: product, price, place and promotion.
