What is Marketing? The Basics of Marketing
Is marketing the same as advertising? While advertising makes up one aspect, marketing involves far more than just advertising. So, what is marketing? What are the benefits of using outsourced marketing? What does a content creation agency do? What types of marketing services should you pay for?
Read on to learn more about marketing basics from Houston marketing agency Illumination Marketing.
What Is Marketing?
Marketing is creating and communicating value to customers by answering the question: “Why should I care?” More specifically, marketing refers to actions companies take to attract an audience to their service or product using high-quality messaging.
Marketing Is a Conversation
When you first meet a new person, you ask them questions to get to know them. Hopefully, you spend more time listening to them and less time talking about yourself.
Marketing is like a conversation with potential customers. What do they want and need? How can your company provide that for them?
Companies that actually care about people and want to help them develop trust with potential customers, possibly even before they need or want your product.
Marketing Requires Empathy
More and more, customers are tuning out pushy ads and ego-driven marketing tactics, instead turning to companies they feel care about them. The more your company can display empathy - toward customers, the environment, or whatever else - the more likely it is to attract and retain passionate customers.
What Is the Purpose of Marketing?
The purpose of marketing is to get people interested in your company’s service or products using market research to understand your ideal customer’s interests. Marketing isn’t simply an afterthought - you should apply it to every aspect of your business from product development through sales, distribution methods, and advertising.
Common Marketing Services
While the largest corporations typically have their own marketing division, smaller businesses often turn to outsourced marketing. What services do corporate marketing companies like Illumination Marketing provide? While each SEO company may offer slightly different services, they will usually offer many of the following.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Did you know the #1 result in a Google search gets nearly one-third (31.7%) of all clicks? In fact, the top organic search result is 10 times more likely to get a click compared to the #10 page.
What happens if your company doesn’t come up on the first page of a search? You may as well not exist, with only 0.78% of Google users clicking on something from the second page.
Search engine optimization - more commonly known as SEO - is the process of creating content that helps your company place as high as possible in search results for various keywords related to your business.
Website Design and Logo Design
What good is a high search ranking if your website and logo look terrible? Website design and logo design are critical components of marketing.
Content Marketing
Content marketing involves using pieces of content, such as blogs, infographics, videos, and social media posts, to build brand awareness and cultivate relationships with customers.
Email Marketing
By sending emails to people who have signed up for them, email marketing helps you drive sales and build important relationships.
Print Marketing
As long as people continue to read newspapers and magazines, print marketing will continue to be a staple where businesses can not only purchase ads, but sponsor photography, articles, and other content to draw attention to their company.
Social Media Marketing
More than 4.26 billion people worldwide used social media in 2021, and that number is expected to increase to nearly 6 billion by 2027.
Social media marketing involves using social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to reach a wider audience and build relationships with new and existing customers.
Video Marketing
Corporate videography and video marketing can be used in conjunction with other marketing methods to expand your brand’s reach.
Influencer Marketing
With the explosion of social media, you can now pay influencers (people with large followings) to promote your product to their millions of followers.
Search Engine Marketing
Using pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, search engine marketing involves businesses paying to have their site listed in a prominent place on search engine results pages.
Retargeting
After a potential or existing customer has interacted with your brand, retargeting is a way to get them to come back, like showing them an advertisement on Facebook for a product they looked at on your site without purchasing it.
The Traditional 4 Ps of Marketing (Plus 4 New Ones)
In 1960, E. Jerome McCarthy came up with the “Marketing mix 4 Ps:” product, place, price, and promotion. In the decades since, marketers have added four more Ps: people, process, physical evidence, and productivity.
Product - What will your service or product be and how does it meet your customers’ needs?
Price - How much money, time, and effort will customers spend purchasing your product (or service)?
Place - How will you deliver your product to customers (e.g. - online or in a physical store)? Do you serve a particular geographic location? Which channels will you use for marketing your product?
Promotion - How will you promote your product or service? Some options include direct marketing, advertising, sales promotion, and public relations.
People - More than just your marketing team, the people aspect of your marketing approach should include customer service, sales, human resources, and more to ensure your customers have all-around positive experiences with your company.
Process - How is the flow of activities or mechanisms that happen between customers and your business? You should consider your customer during every part of that process.
Physical Evidence - You must think about everything physically involved in the process of delivering your products or services, including your store’s location and the way your customer service reps act and dress.
Productivity - Also referred to as performance and quality, productivity looks at how well a company’s offerings compete in the marketplace.
Need Help? Work With a Premier Houston Marketing Agency
If you’re looking for an exceptional SEO company, Houston is home to Illumination Marketing, a content creation agency offering corporate marketing services including website creation, search engine optimization (SEO), corporate videography, social media marketing, logo design, email marketing, and more.
Ready to learn more about how Illumination Marketing can help with your outsourced marketing needs? Contact us today for more information.
