What’s the first thing you think of when you think of marketing?
Let me guess…
ADS!
eww no one likes ads.
I mean I don’t even like ads and I work in marketing, except for those Dr. Squatch ads. Those were pretty cool.
Well there is a little more that goes on in marketing than just ads.
So,
What is Marketing
In the most boring and basic language. “marketing is the activities a company undertakes to promote the buying or selling of a product or service.” Basically just telling other people how great your product is.
This is extremely important for business because it would suck to have a genius idea with no one to know about it.
So, yeah ads can be a way of promoting a product/service. But there can also be content marketing. Such as social media, blogging, e-mail, or even influencer marketing. The whole point is to get to your ideal customer at the right place, at the right time.
How Do I know What I'm Marketing
Before you try to try to create a multi-level extremely complex strategy. You need to know what your product/service is.
This is where the 4 Ps of marketing(marketing mix) come in handy. These should help you identify what you do, how it helps your customers, and how you might get it out there.
- Product
- Price
- Place
- Promotion
Knowing Your Target Audience
This is extremely crucial to marketing. Because selling to the wrong people can cost you a lot of money. If you really pay attention, certain companies sell to certain types of people.
You don’t see RedBull selling to soccer moms.
And if they did people would be so confused and loose so much money.
So that’s why it’s important to know who you are marketing to and the more specific, the better.
One way marketers do this is by creating a customer avatar. This is where they create an overly simplified version of their ideal customer.
It helps them visualize who they are and how they are going to grab their attention.
How Do I Start Marketing
Now, this can get really complex, because there are so many different types of marketing. Such as email, SEO, SEM, and social media.
Each subsection has its own little quirks and going through all of them is going to take a long time.
So this is a simple way of describing a marketing campaign: You are going to define your target audience and take them on a journey. From the moment they know who you are and what you do, until the end when they become a customer.
Again this is extremely simplified, every marketer wishes it was this easy.
Track Marketing Performance
Now that you have created a campaign, how do you know that your effort was worth it?
Like most things, you want to see progress. More specifically KPIs. This can be an increase in views, clicks, or whatever you want to track.
And if you didn’t see any change don’t worry we’ve all been there.
Just learn what you can and see what went wrong.
What Now?
If you’re reading this there is a high chance that you are interested in marketing. And if you want to learn more, don’t be like me. Learn the basics and keep on learning because digital marketing is always changing.