What is marketing in simple words: types, goals, objectives

Team TeachWiki

Marketing is a set of measures to promote goods or services and make a profit from their sale, in simple words, it is the ability to sell a product or service for the benefit of both the business and the target audience. To do this, marketers come up with names and slogans, develop beautiful packaging and hold promotions that show customers how the product will change their lives for the better, and earn money for the business.

What is the purpose of marketing: find out

When choosing the field of study Marketing, it is necessary to understand what is being studied within this discipline. The main goal of marketing is to ensure the maximum sales of products and profit by maximizing consumer satisfaction .

The main goal of marketing is to ensure the maximum sales of products and profit by maximizing customer satisfaction.

Intermediate goals:

The main task of marketing is to ensure the maximum possible stability in the activities of the company, the regularity of its development and the achievement of goals. To complete the task, it is necessary: timely and complete information about the market, competitors, consumer requests; creating a product that best meets the needs of the market and the capabilities of the company, setting the optimal price, as well as developing effective distribution channels and promotion methods.

The economic meaning of marketing is the achievement of the following results:

  1. creation of a competitive product;
  2. successful promotion of goods - the goods must be brought to the buyer in a timely manner, to whom it is intended;

  3. customer satisfaction;
  4. accelerating return on investment;
  5. profitability of production and sale of goods

Research Methods in Marketing

Types of marketing

Marketing can be very different depending on the tasks that a particular business faces, and partly on the properties of the product.

Traditional marketing is an approach where marketers identify their consumer and place ads where the consumer can see, hear or interact with them offline. The term "traditional" refers to any type of marketing that is not conducted online.

Example:

A typical example of traditional outbound marketing is cold calling . In them, you call the maximum number of uninterested or potentially interested people in the hope that they will buy your product. In this case, the conversion is minimal. As an alternative, inbound marketing was created.

Outbound marketing is traditional marketing aimed at getting messages across to potential customers. Outbound marketing includes events such as trade shows, presentation series, and cold calls.

Inbound marketing is a combination of search engine optimization (SEO), social media marketing , content marketing , and other techniques designed to attract, interact with, and convert consumers into leads.

Digital marketing is a set of activities and techniques that use various digital media channels. Internet marketing is a type of digital marketing that uses the Internet to communicate with potential buyers.

Search engine marketing (SEM) is a set of activities aimed at increasing website traffic by its target audience using search engines.

By content marketing, we mean the creation and distribution of digital assets such as blog posts, videos, e-books, white papers and solutions, and various other digital materials that provide valuable information to your audience.

SMM ( Social Media Marketing ) - social media marketing is the promotion of goods and services in social networks, which are perceived by marketing as social media.

Video marketing (lat. video - I see + English marketing - trade in the market, sales promotion) - activities to influence consumer demand in the sale of goods and services. Includes a set of approaches, techniques and activities for promoting goods and services based on the use of video materials.

Conversation marketing is the personalized communication of a business with existing or potential customers in real time using live chat, chat bots, voice assistants and other forms of AI.

Electronic marketing is a set of company marketing activities associated with the use of electronic means. Electronic means include: a personal computer (PC), a personal digital assistant (PDA), a mobile phone, communicators, a telephone, as well as various types of communications - the Internet, fixed telephone communications, mobile communications.

If your answer is yes, you already know what conversational marketing is. It is a method of engaging existing or potential customers in a personalized dialogue in order to better understand their needs and satisfy them.

What Marketers Do:
  • They launch discounts, promotions like "1 + 1 = 3".
  • Introduce a bonus system.
  • They buy native ads from bloggers.

Buzz marketing uses the power of word-of-mouth advertising to create a product or service that is novel enough to go viral. In many cases, buzz marketing amplifies word-of-mouth campaigns with versatile content that can be easily scaled and re-adapted to various contexts and fear of missing out (FOMO).

Influencer marketing is the promotion of goods or services through influencers . Influence marketing is otherwise called influencer marketing (from English influencer marketing), these concepts are identical.

Acquisition marketing can be defined as a marketing strategy that helps you get or "attract" customers and customers who are already willing to buy what you have to offer.

At its most basic level, contextual marketing is, simply put, the useful use of context in marketing. My favorite way to define the term is to deliver the right content to the right people at the right time.

Personalized marketing is an approach to promoting products and services in which a company prepares personalized offers for different categories of customers based on their individual needs.

Brand marketing is a set of methods aimed at creating a brand name, developing design, establishing creative communications and conducting marketing activities that will distinguish a product from competitors and promote it.

Hidden Marketing is a method of advertising goods and services in which consumers are not aware that they are advertising. All tools are aimed at promoting the company's product unobtrusively and accurately, gaining consumer confidence.

Guerrilla marketing is low-budget advertising and marketing methods that allow you to effectively promote your product or service, attract new customers and increase your profits without investing or almost without investing money.

What Marketers Do:
  • Attract agents of influence and online celebrities.
  • Create viral and creative content.
  • They write native comments on social networks, blogs or on specialized services.

Its task is to stimulate demand during fluctuations. The latter can be seasonal, temporary, associated with a change in the request of the audience, with a change in the quality or product packaging, with the intensification of competitors.

What Marketers Do:

Smooth out the drop in demand with the help of flexible prices, discounts, promotions. This, for example, is the sale of winter clothes in spring and early summer, business lunches in cafes during the daytime, when the halls are almost empty.

Want to learn more about Synchromarketing

It solves the problem of revival of demand in the conditions of its long decline.

What Marketers Do:
  • Conduct in-depth product and competitor analysis.
  • They make proposals for revising and expanding the product line, for example, dividing products into men's and women's.

In fact, all manufacturers of deodorants, shampoos, and accessories that write “male deodorant” or “female shaving machine” on their packages follow this path. They do not completely change the product, but position it as different products for different target groups.

An exotic species that aims to reduce demand and consumption. The goals of demarketing can be different: gradually withdraw the product from the market, reduce the number of customers, etc. Most often used in the social sphere. The campaign to save electricity in winter, when the load on the power grid is especially high, is demarketing.

What Marketers Do:

Develop programs to reduce demand. The tool can be, among other things, a price increase.

Even more paradoxical than demarketing, look. It is used not by producers of goods and services, but mainly by state regulatory bodies.

These are, for example, measures to reduce the sales of alcohol and cigarettes with a ban on advertising in the media, with age restrictions on sales, and in the case of alcohol, with the establishment of a time frame for sales.

What Marketers Do:

Develop programs to reduce demand.

It is aimed at activating demand if it is not there: for example, when introducing a new product to the market, which the audience does not yet know about.

Example:

Ice cream on a gum stick appeared on the market. This is a new product at the junction of two well-known ones, ice cream and chewing gum. But no one knows about this product, its properties and advantages.

What Marketers Do:
  • Launch an active advertising campaign: Internet advertising or television advertising.
  • They work with the price - it is logical to sell a new product at the lowest price so that consumers get used to it.
  • If the lack of demand is due to the fact that the product has become irrelevant to the target audience, it can be finalized or repositioned.

This type of marketing works with a product that the market already knows about, but a constant stable demand has not yet been formed.

What Marketers Do:
  • Analyze the needs and needs of the target audience, market offers.
  • Develop an action plan to differentiate from competitors and create a positive image of the product.

Aimed at reaching the target audience. It is relevant in cases where the product is positioned as universal, intended for the most mass market segment.

What Marketers Do:
  • Run mass advertising.
  • Position the product as mass.
  • Develop a pricing policy of the type "as many sales as possible at the lowest favorable price."

Aimed at working with a specific group of target audience and product differentiation. For example, only with parents of children aged 3-7 living in million-plus cities (developing courses), or only with lovers of extreme sports (sleeping bags and tents).

What Marketers Do:
  • Segment the target audience.
  • Conduct in-depth interviews and audience surveys.
  • Working on positioning.

This form combines the features of mass and target marketing. The work is carried out with several target groups (coverage), while each segment of the target audience has its own offer (differentiation).

So, chocolate can be positioned both as a “gourmet dessert”, and as a “snack for office workers”, and as a high-calorie, no-cooking and practically no expiration date meal away from the city.

What Marketers Do:

The same as with mass and targeted marketing, depending on the specific business and tasks.

The most overt type of marketing is a frank, unveiled call to buy a product. It can be used in difficult situations and high competition in the market.

What Marketers Do:

They do not try to present advertising as native: they focus on a direct story about the benefits and cost of a product or service.

Native marketing is a special type of marketing created taking into account the format of the platform on which the advertisement will be placed. That is, the content of advertising will be organically inscribed in non-advertising content, no matter how paradoxical it may sound.

Affiliate marketing is the promotion of goods or services through intermediaries or partners. For businesses, this is a way to reach new audiences and get new customers with the help of partner resources.

Partnership marketing is a strategic collaboration between two or more businesses in which they helps each other to increase brand awareness, reach, social media traffic and promote their products and services to the right target audience or consumer.

Product marketing is an activity that involves bringing a new product to the market, its promotion and support throughout the entire life cycle.

ABM is a strategic marketing approach that focuses on targeted accounts rather than the random "spray and pray" method found in other forms of outreach such as email or social media marketing.

Customer marketing is an important function for companies looking to expand their customer base. The work is focused on existing customers, keeping them satisfied with current purchases so they remain customers, and identifying opportunities to spend more money.

Word of mouth marketing is a marketing technique that allows you to provoke positive conversations about a brand among potential consumers. The technology is based on a feature of human psychology - to trust the advice of friends and acquaintances about goods and services.

I. Gordon (Gordon, 1998) defines relationship marketing as a continuous process of defining and creating new values with the direct participation of an individual consumer, and then sharing and distributing the benefits from this activity between the participants in the interaction.

User-generated content (UGC) is content that consumers create about a brand's products or services. This can be, for example, social media postings, written reviews or unboxing videos.

Campus marketing means that enterprises adopt marketing methods aimed at the campus market. A marketing method to promote products suitable for campus groups in schools . Campus marketing is in the new market environment. The inevitable trend of corporate marketing from traditional marketing to personalized development is the organic combination of corporate marketing innovation and marketing potential rules.

In scientific terms, this is a wireless transmission of marketing content tied to a specific location. For example, the buyer came to the store, he was identified and a notification was sent to him. Moreover, we know what he buys in this store, how often he goes there.

Event marketing is the process of planning, organizing and using people or events with news value, social influence and celebrity effects to attract the interest and attention of the media, social groups and consumers in order to increase the popularity of the company or products, Reputation, the means and methods to establish a good brand image and ultimately promote the sales of products or services.

Experiential, Engaged, Live or Experiential Marketing is a strategy based on how a brand manages to evoke positive emotions in a customer, mainly through involvement in the marketing process. In most cases, all activities are associated with the purchase of a product / service or testing.

Interactive marketing (from the English interactive - interacting) is a fairly new area of work with consumers, which involves the use of innovative approaches and tools.

Global marketing is the marketing of the largest organizations that consider the whole world as a market for their products. Such companies often produce goods, the demand and consumption of which does not depend on national and cultural differences between countries.

Multicultural marketing (also known as ethnic marketing) is the practice of marketing to one or more audiences of a particular ethnicity—usually an ethnic group outside the majority culture of a country, sometimes referred to as the "common market."

Informative marketing is a tool that helps us to inform users with relevant data that can guide their decisions to hit what each of the clients requires .

Neuromarketing is a set of methods for studying the behavior of buyers, the impact on it and the emotional and behavioral reactions to this impact, using developments in the fields of marketing, cognitive psychology and neurophysiology.

Persuasive advertising, also known as competitive advertising, refers to the continuous promotion of products from the introduction period to the growth and maturity stages in order to gain a competitive advantage and ensure a certain market share, so as to strengthen customers' attention to the company's product brand , resulting in selective demand.

Cause Marketing Causal marketing is closely related to corporate social responsibility and is aimed at both increasing brand awareness and positive change in society . All this is done through the support of charitable activities.

Over the years, some advertising strategies have proven to be more effective than others. Particularly popular: controversies. Controversy attracts attention and that is exactly the aim of such advertising. This is intended to draw consumers' attention to a specific company or product .

Field marketing is a comprehensive marketing practice that can help you build a brand, increase awareness of an existing business among its audience, and ultimately improve direct sales.

Marketing business models

According to the type of consumers, it can be divided into three groups.

  1. B2C or business-to-customer
  2. Marketing in the field of "business to consumer", that is, for an ordinary person, the end buyer. It is in B2C that promotions, contests, and loyalty programs work well.

  3. B2B or business-to-business
  4. Marketing in the field of "business to business", in which both the seller and the buyer are not specific people, but companies. When a farm buys a tractor from a manufacturer, this is B2B, when a clothing store buys women's dresses in bulk from a manufacturer, it is also B2B.

    The decision-making process in B2B is not spontaneous, but planned. The buying decision chain involves several people with different positions and different tasks.

  5. B2G, or business-to-government
  6. Marketing in the field of "business for the state", when a company supplies goods or offers services to government agencies. The tasks of a marketer include participation in the preparation for tenders, since almost all goods and services for the state are purchased through a tender system.

Marketing tasks

In order for a business to grow and develop, make a profit, expand market share and stand out among competitors, marketers must work on a whole pool of tasks.

Analysis of customer needs

Not in the whole market, but in the segment where the company operates. The marketer answers questions about whether there is demand, what are the criteria for choosing customers and how to take them into account when introducing new products to the market.

Product Analysis

In this case, the marketer analyzes what can be done to make the product or service best meet the needs and selection criteria of buyers. For example, if one of the criteria is a low price, the manufacturer needs to think about optimizing processes to reduce the cost of the product.

Analysis of competitive offers

Identifying the strengths of competitive offerings will help you understand what to work on to get ahead. Identification of weaknesses - what strengths or specific features of your product it makes sense to focus on in advertising campaigns right now. Marketers also monitor whether competition in a niche is growing or decreasing.

Analysis of work with the price in a specific niche

To build a pricing strategy, it is important to understand what pricing policy competitors adhere to. Perhaps they cut the price as much as possible, profiting from the sale of a large volume of goods. Or, on the contrary, they sell goods expensively, making a profit not from turnover, but from the maximum margin. It is also important whether competitors give a deferment or installment payment, whether they provide any bonuses.

Suggestions for improving the product matrix

This is an “adjustment” of the assortment to consumer demand, which has already been formed. Flexible response to demand is one of the keys to business success. After all, demand is a variable value, it changes - some goods need to be removed from the matrix, new ones need to be developed. If the assortment is not adjusted to demand, large and illiquid stock balances can accumulate, and this is a direct loss for any company.

Planning activities aimed at increasing demand and sales

These are a variety of offline and online advertising campaigns - contests, presentations, tastings, bonuses and gifts for purchases, and so on.

Building communications with the target audience

Without communication, modern marketing is impossible. Today, the distance between sellers and buyers has become minimal due to the presence of the brand in social networks .

It is not enough for people to simply know that such and such a brand exists and produces such and such goods. They want to get answers to their questions, express opinions about products and their manufacturers, leave reviews and feel that their opinion is important.

The task of the marketing team is to ensure that communications increase and maintain the loyalty of the audience, and not scare it away.

Development of standards and directions of customer service

This task is very important, because with the same product offerings, competitors can be bypassed by providing a better service.

For example, if competitors give 14 days to exchange and return goods, and you have a month, this can be a competitive advantage. If your standards require a response to requests on social networks or on a blog within 15 minutes (including with the connection of chat bots), this can also be a significant advantage. After all, modern buyers are not ready to wait for an answer for weeks.

Work on the formation of the image and reputation of the company

Reputation is a very important component of a successful business. If the company does not work out the negative , does not take care that the information field contains more positive and at the same time honest, not bought, information, audience loyalty may fall. And with it, sales.

For example, a company that specializes in moving does not respond to negative reviews and does not work with them in any way. Today, if you enter into the search engine the name of this company plus the word "reviews" ...

4 main functions of marketing

  1. Analytical

    Includes all activities to study the factors affecting the market, demand, the company itself and its position among competitors. Commodity analysis of the market - identifying how and with the help of which products consumers are now solving their problems.

    This also includes the study of standards, norms and requirements that apply to the company's product.

  2. Managerial

    Planning of marketing events, calendar and sequence of their launches. Product release planning - how much and when to put it on the market - and tracking feedback from customers and partners.

  3. Production

    Marketing involves, among other things, tracking new technologies that will help improve product quality and optimize costs. As well as organizing procurement for the needs of production and work on quality management.

  4. Sales

    This includes everything related to the price and product policy of the company, as well as any activities aimed at expanding demand, entering new markets or new audience groups. The organization of customer service also refers to the sales function of marketing.

Marketing tools

All marketing tools, or marketing channels, are divided into offline and online options. Consider the tools of Internet marketing as the most relevant for the readers of our blog.

SEO (Search engine optimization)

This is search engine optimization, or website optimization, taking into account the requirements of search engines. It is high-quality SEO that helps the company's website to take high positions in organic results and collect maximum traffic from search engines. According to "Yandex.Radar" for only one week of April...

High-quality SEO helps to reach this huge audience and find among them those who are interested in a product, service or website topic.

contextual advertising

This marketing tool also helps the site to get to the top of the search results. But not through long and hard optimization, but through the purchase of advertising.

SMM (Social media marketing)

This is the promotion of the company in social networks. The task of SMM is not just to offer a product, but to communicate with users, increase the number of subscribers to a company account, and involve them in dialogues and interaction. It is possible to organize sales directly in social networks and transfer traffic from social networks to the site.

Targeted advertising

This is a targeted marketing tool that also works in social networks and correlates with SMM in much the same way as SEO with contextual advertising. This includes paid sponsored posts that, through fine-tuning, can be shown only to users who are likely to be interested in them.

Banner (media) advertising

Banner advertising is placed on the main page of Yandex and on its partner sites. As a rule, display advertising solves the problem not of momentary sales, but of audience coverage - after all, in order for a product to be bought, it is first necessary to be known about it.

Chatbots

A modern marketing tool that provides quick communication with users on social networks or on the website. This is a special program that communicates using scripts - pre-written scripts, and perfectly fulfills typical situations.

A big plus of a chatbot is that the user will receive a quick response at any time of the day and any day of the week. In addition, a chatbot can personalize communication, for example, by addressing a user by name.

Native advertising

As a rule, these are advertisements from bloggers, for example, on the Yandex.Zen platform . Most often, a blogger talks about their experience using a product or recommends a blog or channel from a company that ordered native advertising.

In this case, there are no “Promo” or “Advertising” marks; an article or video can be perceived not as advertising, but as informational. And if a blogger has a loyal audience, there can be a lot of traffic from native advertising.

Viral advertising

This is the promotion of the product with the help of reposts. Viral advertising is all about creating content that people want to share and (ideally) linking it in some way to the brand or its products.

Often viral advertising beats the most current events. Internet users willingly share topical memes, debatable, refuting or revealing materials:

Viral promotion helps to increase brand, product, and expert awareness.

Content Marketing

An effective marketing tool is “sales without sales”, product promotion using content . Content can be in any format. These include videos, newsletters, blog articles, and social media posts.

Competent content marketing helps build long-term relationships with existing audiences and attract new ones. And also create a positive informational background and natively, without pressure, show the benefits of the product.

Promotion on marketplaces

The main commodity marketplaces today are Ozon, Wildberries, Yandex.Market. Marketplaces of services - "Yandex.Services", "Profi.ru". All these are resources with high attendance, great opportunities for presentation and reviews only from real buyers.

Push messages

Humanitarian marketing tool. When visiting the site, the user is prompted to allow push notifications in the browser in one click. If a person agrees to receive them, you can send him information about new products and promotions.

Promotion in messengers

Messengers (the main ones are Telegram and WhatsApp) work by analogy with social networks, but they are somewhat simpler - for example, it is very easy to create accounts in messengers, communication takes place in chats.

A big plus of instant messengers is that they are always at hand - any person, leaving the house, takes a smartphone with them.

Email Marketing

If the company has a large database of customer email addresses, you can actively work with them - send out personalized offers, information about discounts, promotions, new products, sales; share content from the site or from social networks.

In the sales funnel outside of social networks, this marketing tool is almost always present. E-mail marketing is indispensable and, if necessary, to wake up "asleep" buyers: with the help of a letter, you can quickly remind yourself.

Retargeting

A marketing tool that also allows you to wake up the "asleep" and even return the departed customers, buyers, users. Retargeting technology allows you to make a person an offer that most likely matches his interests.

For example, a person has been buying tackle, accessories and lure for many years in the 3 minnows online store. But at some point he stopped visiting the store. Retargeting assumes that after 3, 4 or 6 months (you can set any period proposed by the marketer), the online store will send him a letter like:

“Dear Vasily, you haven’t visited us for a long time, and we are upset. After all, we have so many new products that could please you.

Look at this excellent spinning rod, this unusual lure, and we also now have a section of dishes and thermoses for fishermen. For you personally, dear Vasily, a 10% discount on any purchase using an individual promotional code VASYA within 3 days.

Mobile Marketing

This is advertising in applications , as well as sending sms messages. In fact, this marketing tool links online and offline spaces and allows you to quickly convey information to the user. After all, almost every person has one or more mobile gadgets, and each has a dozen applications installed.

crowd marketing

A tool that involves posting reviews and recommendations on various sites - from review sites to forums and blogs. It helps to increase brand awareness and works to build its positive reputation in the digital environment.

Marketing strategies and stages of their development

Marketing is not separate tools and activities to promote a product. Strategy is important - a long-term plan for business development and product promotion. Any business needs to understand the goals that need to be achieved in the long term, and determine the path by which to move towards these goals.

Consider several types of strategies.

Market expansion

It provides for the horizontal development of the company, entering new markets, analyzing competitors and looking for opportunities to make your unique selling proposition more profitable.

Integrated growth

Not so much business expansion as its vertical growth - through the development of new products that have no analogues.

Diversification

Helps in situations where the market is shrinking or the product is becoming obsolete. The task of the strategy is to determine how, with the resources already available, it is possible to produce different types of products that are relevant to the market.

Cost reduction

It is necessary to improve the overall efficiency of a business that has been on the market for a long time; helps to avoid stagnation. The essence of the strategy is to reduce the number of employees, introduce new technologies, and perhaps even completely reorganize the company.

The development of any marketing strategy includes 7 important steps:

  1. Market research. Analysis of macroeconomic indicators - GDP, inflation rate, the state of the labor market and monetary policy. The influence of geopolitical factors is also assessed, since business exists in society, and not in a vacuum.

  2. Business opportunity assessment. First of all, this is a SWOT analysis with the identification of the strengths and weaknesses of the company / enterprise, as well as an analysis of the capacities and those marketing channels that the company uses.

  3. Assessment of competitors. With the help of available open sources, strategies for promoting competitors are studied - this helps to determine the positioning and search for tuning opportunities.

  4. Definition of marketing goals. Sales growth - for how long and by what percentage, expansion of market share - to what values, coverage of new audience segments - which ones.

  5. Positioning selection . At this stage of developing a marketing strategy, answers to the questions are needed: who is the product aimed at? How often is it bought? What message do product manufacturers want to convey to users? The answers will help the marketer in developing advertising slogans, in which the main messages are laid.

  6. Evaluation of market segments and consumer demands . At this stage, based on the capabilities of the company, positioning, consumer interests, methods of promotion in the market are determined.

  7. Economic evaluation of marketing strategy . This stage is all about money, costs and profits. Marketers and financial analysts calculate how much money is needed to implement the strategy, how and in what timeframe the investments will pay off, what the planned profit will be. In fact, this is a business plan for implementing a marketing strategy.

Bonus: Best Marketing Books

Learn more about practical marketing with our selection of recommended books:

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