Marketing is a social and administrative process through which groups and individuals obtain what they need and want through generating, offering and exchanging valuable products with their peers. It is about understanding everything behind a sale, to motivate and incentivize it.
What is Marketing?
The word Marketing is synonymous with the word Marketing, which in turn is called by many professionals by its English term: Marketing.
With the semantic issues of the word clear, we are going to address the issue of its definition.
Marketing as a concept is a social and administrative process through which groups and individuals obtain what they need and want, to satisfy consumer needs, through generating, offering and exchanging products of value with their peers.
Marketing strategies seek to achieve consumer satisfaction through strategies that respond to their needs. These strategies allow companies to reach their customers with the right offers, at the right times, in order to meet the ultimate goal of anyone who creates a business model: selling.
Everything ends in the sale, but doing Marketing is not just about selling, it is about understanding everything behind that sale, to motivate and incentivize.
For this reason, Marketing professionals strive to understand psychological, cultural and behavioral factors of those they want to reach. Additionally, they must always keep in mind two extremes that are important in their decisions, with social responsibility.
On the one hand there are the statistical data that show the panorama they must face and the numbers they must reach; and on the other is creativity, which has to be present so that your strategies do not become a landscape that no one wants to see anymore.
Types of Marketing
Social marketing
Its objective is to draw attention to or help mitigate social problems, related to issues such as public health, nutrition, work, education and housing, for example. Seeks to increase general well-being.
Mass marketing
It consists of the mass production, distribution and promotion of a product or service, without any level of segmentation. It is a strategy that attempts to attract all types of buyers, without a focus on a particular buyer persona.
Personalized marketing
It is a strategy that focuses on the preferences, history and profile of a specific consumer, in order to create direct and much more personal communication with each person. It is also known as One to One Marketing.
Commercial marketing
This type is part of a broader strategy, which takes into account different factors to create a winning sales plan. In this way, products and services can be promoted, allowing more people to know about them, thus facilitating the closing process for the sales team.
How to establish a good application process in your company?
To better describe how to draw up a relevant Marketing process, we can analyze the following image and establish key points of view:
- Opportunity analysis
Let’s imagine that we find a secret formula for creating a product or service.
The first step is to analyze the true opportunities that the idea that is incubating in our mind has.
One of the keys to discovering if there is an opportunity is to check if there is a shortage of what we are thinking about.
Another is to analyze if perhaps our product or service already exists, but we are going to be able to supply it in a better way. And the final key to take into account is if we detect the need that our product or service is going to satisfy, but the market simply does not know what we are proposing is about.
Example of opportunity analysis
Uber is a great example of a brand always looking for new opportunities. First, they arrived as an option to improve a service already existing in the market and little by little they have evolved by offering more and more solutions.
- Market research
Now what we have to do is measure and try to predict how attractive that market may be.
Market research or studies must consider the minimum variables for decision making. The first is a method of obtaining information, followed by an interpretation of the collected data. In the end, that interpretation must end in decision-making based on the findings.
In the Marketing process, research and analysis are key so that we do not reach a market completely blind.
Data analysis is so important that many brands have begun to use it to their advantage to create programs to improve social problems.
Marketing research example
This is the case of Whirlpool, which created a program to reach schools and lend a hand with something basic: laundry. It is worth watching the video of this case to understand how they used data from a problem to provide a solution.
- Creation of the strategy
In this step we must sit down and decide what strategy we are going to use to achieve success in terms of communication and commercialization of our idea.
The analysis we do of our market research is key. This will give us the direction that we must draw in the strategy. Here we begin to define what, how, for whom (target audience) and where we are going to do it. Taking into account three basic objectives:
- Direction: This is the focus we want to give to the strategy. It’s the moment when we decide who is Batman and who is Robin. There cannot be two main characters in a story, we must always decide where we are going to dedicate the greatest efforts. For this, it is useful to already define a buyer persona.
- Differentiation: We must plan our strategy so that it is relevant enough to the people we are going to reach. Here it is key to do something powerful enough to be seen in the best possible way.
- Positioning: Here we must decide what will be the collective thought that we want to implant in the people we are going to reach. What is the first thing we want to come to a person’s mind when they think about our brand. Therefore, it is relevant to think about a Branding strategy.
A great communication strategy is evident in the following beer commercial video. They found the perfect way to combine what, how, where and to whom to say what they wanted to highlight about their product, keeping in mind its targeting, differentiation and positioning.
Creation and application of tactics
This part of the Marketing process is where four basic principles of Marketing plans or a Marketing plan come into play.
The 4 P’s (you will surely find people talking about how this is an old concept, but the truth is still the basis for building Marketing tactics), will help us establish actions for the Product, Price, Place or distribution channel and the Promotion that we are going to do to communicate.
- Product
It is what we will create or transform to go out and offer it to the public. Products can be tangible or intangible as in the case of services.
Here we have a great example of how to tactically use the strategic objective of connecting with people: Castorama, a French Retailer that sells DIY products, created a wallpaper that tells stories!
- Price
Price tactics within Marketing can be diverse and range from setting them in competitive terms (production costs, profit margin, to masterful ways of communicating them). Like the following examples in which there are two retailers as protagonists. Here we will see two examples because they are both so good that it is not worth excluding any.
- Place or distribution channel
It refers to any physical or virtual place that we make available so that our target can access our product. In the following example we can see how several brands used one of their distribution channels to join a collective cause, which resulted in great success.
- Promotion
This includes all the communication actions or commercial activities that we design to promote our product. A great example is the case of Netflix, in which they created an absolutely differentiated and fun way to communicate one of their star series.
In addition to direct promotion with communication in channels such as email marketing and social networks, there are also alternatives to attract customers, such as Content Marketing and Inbound Marketing itself.
Conclusion
Marketing as a theory contains a series of variables that can make it seem like something easy or something that anyone can do. Many call it science, many others call it art.
Honestly, I think it has a lot of both, because as a science there is a structured process that must be respected and as an art it only limits the scope of our creativity.
Therefore, if one day we decide to do Marketing for an idea or product, we must always keep in mind that success lies in respecting the formula, but also in going outside of it.
