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What Is Marketing? 

Marketing is a division of a company, product line, individual, or entity that promotes its service. Marketing attempts to encourage market participants to buy their product and commit loyalty to a specific company. 

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Marketing refers to activities a company undertakes to promote the buying or selling of a product or service. Marketing includes advertising, selling, and delivering products to consumers or other businesses. Some marketing is done by affiliates on behalf of a company. 

Professionals who work in a corporation's marketing and promotion departments seek to get the attention of key potential audiences through advertising. Promotions are targeted to certain audiences and may involve celebrity endorsements, catchy phrases or slogans, memorable packaging or graphic designs and overall media exposure. 

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Why Is Marketing So Important? 

Marketing is important for a few reasons. First, marketing campaigns may be the first time a customer interacts with or is exposed to a company's product. A company can educate, promote, and encourage potential buyers. Marketing also helps shape the brand image a company wants to convey. For example, an outdoor camping gear company that wants to be known for its rugged, tough goods can embark on specific campaigns that embody these traits and make these emotions memorable to prospective customers. 

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What Is the Purpose of Marketing? 

An important goal of marketing is propelling a company’s growth. This can be seen through attracting and retaining new customers.  

Companies may apply different marketing strategies to achieve these goals. For instance, matching products with customers' needs could involve personalization, prediction, and knowing the right problem to solve.  Another strategy is creating value through the customer experience. This is demonstrated through efforts to elevate customer satisfaction and remove any difficulties with the product or service. 

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What Are the 4 Ps of Marketing? 

A commonly used concept in the marketing field, the Four Ps of marketing looks at four key elements of a marketing strategy. The Four Ps consist of product, price, place, and promotion.

What Are the Types of Marketing? 

There are dozens of types of marketing, and the types have proliferated with the introduction and rise of social media, mobile platforms, and technological advancements. Before technology, marketing might have been geared towards mail campaigns, word-of-mouth campaigns, billboards, delivery of sample products, TV commercials, or telemarketing. Now, marketing encompasses social media, targeted ads, e-mail marketing, inbound marketing to attract web traffic, and more. 

Key Takeaways:

• Marketing refers to all activities a company does to promote and sell products or services to consumers. 

• Marketing makes use of the "marketing mix," also known as the four Ps—product, price, place, and promotion. 

• Marketing used to be centered around traditional marketing techniques including television, radio, mail, and word-of-mouth strategies. 

• Though traditional marketing is still prevalent, digital marketing now allows companies to engage in e-mail, social media, affiliate, and content marketing strategies. 

• At its core, marketing seeks to take a product or service, identify its ideal customers, and draw the customers' attention to the product or service available. 

Understanding Marketing:

Marketing as a discipline involves all the actions a company undertakes to draw in customers and maintain relationships with them. Networking with potential or past clients is part of the work too, and may include writing thank you emails, playing golf with prospective clients, returning calls and emails quickly, and meeting with clients for coffee or a meal. At its most basic level, marketing seeks to match a company's products and services to customers who want access to those products. Matching products to customers ensure profitability. 

Types of Marketing Strategies: 

Marketing is comprised of an incredibly broad and diverse set of strategies. The industry continues to evolve, and the strategies below may be better suited for some companies over others. 

Digital Marketing: 

The marketing industry has been forever changed with the introduction of digital marketing. From the early days of pop-up ads to targeted placements based on viewing history, there are now innovative ways companies can reach customers through digital marketing. With our expert marketing consultants, Actsure ensures that your enterprise be guided, advised and assisted with marketing your services and/or product in the most professional and effective way.  

• Search Engine Marketing: This entails companies attempting to increase search traffic through two ways. First, companies can pay search engines for placement on result pages. Second, companies can emphasise search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to organically place highly on search results. 

• E-mail Marketing: This entails companies obtaining customer or potential customer e-mail addresses and distributing messages. These messages can include coupons, discount opportunities, or advance notice of upcoming sales. 

• Social Media Marketing: This entails building an online presence on specific social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Linkedin. Like search engine marketing, companies can place paid advertisements to bypass algorithms and obtain a higher chance of being seen by viewers. Otherwise, a company can attempt to organically grow by posting content, interacting with followers, or uploading media like photos and videos. 

• Content Marketing: This entails creating content, whether eBooks, infographics, video seminars, or other downloadable content. The goal is to create a product (often free) to share information about a product, obtain customer information, and encourage customers to continue with the company beyond the content. 
   

Benefits of Marketing: 

Well-defined marketing strategies can benefit a company in several ways. It may be challenging in developing the right strategy or executing the plan; when done well, marketing can yield the following results. 

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• Audience Generation. Marketing allows a company to target specific people it believes will benefit from its product or service. Sometimes, people know they have the need. Other times, they do not realize it. Marketing enables a company to connect with a cohort of people that fit the demographic of who the company aims to serve. 

• Inward Education. Marketing is useful for collecting information to be processed internally to drive success. For example, consider market research that finds a certain product is primarily purchased by women aged 18-34 years old. By collecting this information, a company can better understand how to cater to this demographic, drive sales, and be more efficient with resources. 

• Outward Education. Marketing can also be used to communicate with the world what your company does, what products you sell, and how your company can enrich the lives of others. Campaigns can be educational, informing those outside of your company and why they need your product. In addition, marketing campaigns let a company introduce itself, its history, its owners, and its motivation for being the company it is. 

• Brand Creation. Marketing allows a company to take an offensive approach to creating a brand. Instead of a customer shaping their opinion of a company based on their interactions, a company can preemptively engage a customer with specific content or media to drive certain emotions or reactions. This allows a company to shape its image before the customer has ever interacted with its products. 

• Financial Performance. The goal and benefit of marketing is to drive sales. When relationships with customers are stronger, well-defined, and positive, customers are more likely to engage in sales. When marketing is done right, customers turn to your company, and you gain a competitive advantage over your competitors. Even if both products are the same, marketing can create that competitive advantage for why a client picks you over someone else. 

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Limitations of Marketing: 

Though there are many reasons a company embarks on marketing campaigns, there are several limitations to the industry. 

• Oversaturation. Every company wants customers to buy its product and not its competitors. Therefore, marketing channels can be competitive as companies strive to garner more positive attention and recognition. If too many companies are competing, a customer's attention may be strongly diluted, resulting in some form of advertising not being effective. 

• Devaluation. When a company promotes a price discount or sale, the public may psychologically eventually see that product as worth less in the future. If a campaign is so strong, customers may even wait to purchase a good knowing or remembering what the sale price was from before. For example, some may intentionally hold off on buying goods if Black Friday is approaching. 

• No Guaranteed Success. Marketing campaigns may incur upfront expenses that hold no promise of future success. This is also true of market research studies, where time, effort, and resources are poured into a study that may yield no usable or helpful results. 

• Customer Bias. Loyal, long-time customers need no enticing to buy a company's brand or product. However, newer, uninitiated customers may. Marketing naturally is biased towards non-loyal patrons as those who already support the company would be better served in further investment in bettering products. 

• Cost. Marketing campaigns may be expensive. Digital marketing campaigns may be labor-intensive to set up and costly to maintain the scheduling, implementation, and execution of the plan. Do not forget about the headlines that promote Super Bowl commercial expenses in the millions. 

• Economy-Dependent. Marketing is most successful when people have capital to spend. Though marketing can create non-financial benefits like brand loyalty and product recognition, the goal is to drive sales. During unfavorable macroeconomic conditions when unemployment is high or recession concerns are elevated, consumers may be less likely to spend no matter how great a market campaign may be.