Understanding Marketing for Beginners – The success of a business often depends on creating a solid business or marketing plan.
However, did you know that marketing is a crucial factor that determines the life and death of a business?
When executed with the right strategy, marketing can enhance your brand’s reputation and help achieve your desired revenue.
Of course, this is provided that you’ve chosen the appropriate type of marketing and executed it effectively.
To help your business soar, this article will discuss what marketing is and explore the various types of marketing. Let’s dive in!
Marketing is the process of introducing products to customers. This process involves various activities, including promotion, distribution, sales, and product development strategies.
In practice, marketing often begins with market research and analyzing consumer needs based on their buyer personas.
However, even if these activities are ongoing, it’s essential to keep your marketing strategies up-to-date as the landscape evolves.
Now that you understand the concept of marketing let’s explore its functions and benefits.
The primary function of marketing is to connect a brand with potential customers. To achieve this connection effectively, marketing involves identifying the needs of potential customers and how a company can fulfill those needs.
Consequently, marketing offers significant benefits for businesses, including:
As you can see, marketing can be considered the legs of a business. With marketing, a business can move in the desired direction.
However, marketing approaches vary depending on the specific needs of a company. Let’s discover the most suitable types of marketing for your business in the following discussion.
Discover the various marketing strategies that you can use to meet your business needs:
Objective: Understand the emotional motivations of your target market when considering a product.
Psychology marketing is a type of marketing that utilizes the psychology of how consumers think and make purchasing decisions.
By applying psychology marketing, you can create promotional strategies that motivate consumers to take the desired action, such as participating in flash sales or taking advantage of massive discounts.
You don’t need to interact directly with consumers to implement this marketing type; you can use websites, social media, or online marketplaces. Some examples include:
Objective: Expand promotional reach accurately to the general audience.
Viral marketing is a promotional strategy that leverages the audience to disseminate information about your product or service. This marketing strategy is capable of boosting business popularity rapidly.
Why should businesses consider implementing viral marketing? This strategy has several advantages:
To maximize the use of this marketing strategy, ensure you know your target audience and create high-quality, emotional content that encourages sharing.
Objective: Expand target audience reach and enhance marketing strategy effectiveness.
Digital marketing is the effort to introduce products or services through digital media and the internet.
Since digital platforms are diverse, digital marketing types are also divided based on their use:
Learning digital marketing allows you to enhance your marketing effectiveness. This type of marketing is powerful for targeting specific markets, making it easier to evaluate and develop relevant promotional strategies for potential customers.
To execute the above digital marketing methods, you can utilize various marketing channels like websites, landing pages, blogs, and increase engagement with customers through WhatsApp Business.
Objective: Attract the target audience’s attention to the product.
Guerilla marketing is a marketing strategy that uses surprise elements to capture the attention of potential customers.
An example is Colgate’s collaboration with an ice cream company to create toothbrush-shaped ice cream sticks.
Many businesses have started using guerilla marketing because:
To implement guerilla marketing, continuously explore creative ideas for product or service introduction, understand your audience for a stronger impact, and convey a concise and clear promotional message.
Objective: Engage consumers directly with the product or service.
Experiential marketing is a marketing strategy that invites consumers to experience using your business’s products firsthand.
This product marketing strategy is considered effective because consumers can directly assess the quality of the offered products.
There are five types of experiential marketing you can implement, including product exhibitions, hosting seminars, organizing events, promoting user-generated content, and sharing immersive experiences through Virtual Reality.
When implementing experiential marketing, some strategies include setting clear objectives (e.g., building brand awareness), sharing genuine experiences without fabrication, and asking for feedback from consumers after they have used your product.
Objective: Boost and expand promotion through word of mouth or close connections.
Referral marketing stems from the words ‘reference’ or ‘recommendation.’ It means that referral marketing involves encouraging your customers to recommend your products or services to other consumers.
Why is this method effective? Referral marketing makes a product appear more convincing because potential customers learn about others’ experiences using your product/service beforehand.
No wonder this marketing type can generate 3-5 times higher conversion rates and create a continuous promotional cycle.
While affiliate marketing may seem similar to referral marketing, they are different. Referral marketing rewards include incentives like discounts and cashback, while affiliate marketing offers a specific commission.
Objective: Execute long-term promotion with minimal cost.
Affiliate marketing is a digital marketing method where someone earns a commission after successfully promoting your product, whether through sales, encouraging others to install an application, etc.
If you have an online business or digital product, this marketing type is perfect for implementation. Its operation relies on clicking links, banners, or inputting coupon codes.
An example is the Niagahoster Affiliate Program. Affiliates receive up to a 70% commission each time they successfully encourage someone to subscribe to Niagahoster’s products.
As you can see, affiliate marketing allows your company’s promotion to continue without investing extra capital. Affiliates operate independently, and you only pay for successful promotions.
Objective: Combine the strengths of various marketing types.
The marketing mix is a strategy that uses multiple marketing efforts to achieve the desired sales target. This marketing strategy is widely used by business practitioners, whether new or established.
In essence, the marketing mix has seven fundamental elements: product, price, place, promotion, physical evidence, people, and process.
In the marketing mix, you start by designing the best consumer-needed product and ensuring it is affordably priced. Additionally, you need to create a product that remains relevant through various promotional efforts.
Objective: Leverage the power of social media influencers to promote your brand.
Influencer marketing involves partnering with influential people on social media platforms to promote your products or services. By collaborating with influencers who have a significant following, your brand can reach a larger audience and gain credibility through these trusted individuals.
To maximize the benefits of influencer marketing, identify influencers whose values align with your brand, establish a clear collaboration agreement, and track the performance of the campaign to measure its success.
Objective: Produce and distribute valuable content to attract and convert the target audience into customers.
Content marketing is a strategic approach that focuses on creating and sharing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to engage and retain a specific target audience.
The ultimate goal is to drive profitable customer actions by providing information that educates, entertains, or inspires.
Successful content marketing strategies involve understanding your audience’s needs, producing high-quality content, and utilizing various distribution channels, such as blogs, social media, and email newsletters.
Objective: Target potential customers based on their geographic location.
Geo-targeting is a marketing strategy that focuses on delivering tailored content and advertisements to potential customers based on their geographical location.
This approach allows businesses to reach their target audience more effectively by offering products or services that are relevant to the local market.
Geo-targeting can be implemented through digital advertising platforms, social media, and search engine marketing. To achieve optimal results, it is essential to analyze the local market’s preferences and create tailored marketing messages that resonate with the audience.
Objective: Provide a seamless and consistent experience across all marketing channels.
Omni-channel marketing aims to deliver a unified and integrated customer experience across all touchpoints, including in-store, online, mobile, and social media.
This approach ensures that customers have a consistent and seamless experience throughout their journey, from initial brand discovery to post-purchase support.
To execute a successful omni-channel marketing strategy, businesses need to understand customer behavior across all channels, ensure consistent branding and messaging, and integrate data from various sources for a comprehensive understanding of customer preferences and needs.
Understanding the Key Responsibilities of Marketing Professionals
Marketing is a diverse field with numerous professional roles. However, there are some general tasks that marketing professionals should be familiar with:
With a clear understanding of marketing tasks, it’s essential to develop specific skills for a successful career in this field.
Here are some vital skills for anyone working in marketing:
Every business needs marketing, so it’s no surprise that there are numerous job opportunities in this field. Marketing roles vary based on the focus of the job, and some examples include:
