The BA BA of marketing?

Marketing is what you say and how you say it when you want to explain how great your product is and why people should buy it. He is a advertising, a brochure, a press release. Let's face it, for the average business person, marketing equals promotion.

For many business people, it's simply about selling on a larger scale. The reality is that marketing sits at the intersection of the business and the customer – the grand arbiter of the company's self-interest and the buyer's needs. Marketing plays an important role today.

In this article, we're going to tell you what you need to know about marketing in our own way. But first, here is a software that will allow you to turn your prospects into customers.

Let's go

🔰 What is Marketing?

I teach students that marketing is a conversation. It is the conversation that begins between two people who do not know each other well. Good conversations lead to understanding the needs of the interlocutors.

Big ideas like this lead to amazing products delivered through engaging customer experiences. It's marketing. When I meet someone I don't know, I ask them questions. I'm trying to get to know him. I try to understand his dreams, his problems and his needs.

I do NOT talk about myself unless he is genuinely interested in knowing more about me. But that only comes from true and genuine empathy. I have to really care about this other person to gain their trust.

This conversation continues as we understand each other better. And like human relationships, the brands that have deeper connections are those that seem to care more about each other than themselves.

And just like in real life and everyday human interactions, marketing means you have to give way more than you hope to receive.

Great marketers are passionate teachers, sharing their expertise with only the hope that they help people. The commercial advantage lies in establishing trust and community building who believe in you to help them when needed.

When given the choice, we only buy brands we know, love and trust!

🔰 What is the brand?

I learned a long time ago that your brand is something that exists in the mind of your customer. Ads do not change the perception of your brand. Branding is a judgment, a feeling, a feeling, which is created by the sum of all the interactions I have with a company.

Only experiences change the perception of a brand in the customer's mind. Brands must deliver incredible customer experiences.

Not just in the products we sell and how we deliver “ features ”, but in the way we behave as a company, in the way your employees treat me, in the sum of all these experiences, a brand is created.

I think that'Apple and Starbucks care about providing great technology and great coffee. But I also think Apple delivers on its promise of easy-to-use, simply and beautifully designed products. I believe Starbucks cares more about its impact on the world than selling more coffee.

True or false, This is the experience I have with these brands. This experience is deeply ingrained in my mind. And no amount of advertising, logos or salespeople could change that.

🔰 Marketing and Branding

Marketing can have a positive or negative impact on the brand. It can help create a positive brand experience by having positive, helpful, and empathetic conversations with their customers.

Marketers can harm brands when they interrupt our TV shows and web experiences by running ads of men with cute girls on one arm and their product in the other.

Companies that think a million dollars in sexist, promotional advertising, logos splattered all over the place, grumpy employees and pushy salespeople are simply lost. They don't understand the world we live in.

🔰 Marketing helps build brands through great experiences

In the perfect world, marketing supports creation of strong brands. Great brands do great marketing. They act as teachers to their audience by delivering incredible products. They treat their employees with respect and act as caring global citizens, thinking of future generations.

Great brands show us who they are in the experiences they deliver. Marketing seeks to understand what a great experience should be. Advertising interrupts our experiences and sometimes we don't hate them for it.

🔰 Types of Marketing

For those who think marketing is the same thing as advertising, nothing could be further from the truth. Advertising can certainly be a small part of a marketing plan, but it's only one piece of the puzzle. Indeed, it is possible to work from a marketing strategy that does not use advertising at all.

It can roughly be divided into offline and online or digital methods. Offline marketing consists of advertising “ traditional » in print, radio and television marketing, as well as attending events such as trade shows, fairs and conferences. It can also include word of mouth marketing.

Most businesses will use a combination of online and offline marketing methods. However, these days the balance is shifting more towards online marketing.

Indeed, consumers are spending more and more time online and digital marketing offers various advantages in terms of speed, efficiency and return on investment. So let's look at some of the different types of online marketing available to businesses today:

✔️ Content Marketing

Publishing content in different forms to build brand awareness and maintain customer relationships. It is generally considered a type of digital marketing, but it can also take place offline.

Examples of content marketing include blogs, social media posts, infographics, and videos.

✔️ Search Engine Optimization

Commonly referred to as SEO, it is the process of optimizing your website content to make it more visible to search engines and attract more traffic from searches.

✔️ Search Engine Marketing 

Also known as pay-per-click or PPC, with this type of marketing, businesses pay to have a link to their site placed prominently on search engine results pages.

✔️ Social Media Marketing

Use social media like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to build relationships with existing customers and reach a wider audience through digital word-of-mouth.

✔️ Email Marketing

Sending regular email communications to users who have subscribed to your list to build relationships and drive sales.

✔️ retargeting 

the retargeting is a powerful marketing tool used to gain new customers. Contact existing or potential customers after they've already had an interaction with your brand to get them to return or convert to a sale. For example, place an ad on their Facebook feed of a particular product they viewed on your site.

✔️ Influence marketing

Use high profile people and lots of social media followers to promote your product or service.

These are just a few examples of the most popular types of digital marketing in play today. Each of these methods can be broken down into several other types of marketing and indeed there are hundreds or thousands of different types of marketing covering both online and offline channels.

No business relies on just one form of marketing. On the other hand, unless you are a multinational with a practically unlimited budget and resources, it is also not possible to tackle all the different forms of marketing.

To form a Marketing strategy effective for your individual business, you must select the types of marketing that will be most effective for you and form a plan in which they are integrated into a main strategy.

🔰 The difference between marketing and sales

Sales and marketing are closely related but they cover distinct activities in your business.

The sales team has no say in what the product is or who buys it – they simply take leads and convinces them to buy. Employees working in sales need to build close relationships with your customers, and they need marketing intelligence to do so.

The marketing team provides these leads by educating potential customers about your brand and product. They also use customer feedback and intelligence to decide which products to produce in the future or how to modify existing products to better meet customer needs.

You will not be effective at selling unless the people you are selling to already have some knowledge of your brand or product – that's what marketing can do for you.

For a successful strategy, marketing and sales teams must work closely together and have a unified approach. This ensures that only good quality leads are forwarded to the sales team.

🔰 Understanding your customer from marketing

In marketing, knowing your customer is essential. In fact, some marketers go so far as to say that marketing is essentially the process of understanding your customers.

It should start early in your professional journey, before your brand even takes shape. This initial marketing involves researching and learning from your customers in order to develop a product or service that meets their wants and needs.

This in-depth customer research is not a one-off marketing task, but continue. Focus groups, customer surveys, and collecting user data online are all ways that can help you learn more about your changing customer base and ensure your brand is communicating with them in a meaningful way. the right way.

Once a particular product or service has been introduced to the market, its success should be evaluated to see if it meets customer needs. Marketing also plays a role in customer service and nurturing customer relationships.

It's not just about reaching new customers, but also ensuring that you get the most out of your existing customers and that they stay as long as possible. Digital marketing has opened up a new world of possibilities to better understand your customers and build relationships with them.

We now have the ability to collect vast amounts of data about individuals, including their demographics, location, shopping habits, previous brand interactions, likes and dislikes, and more.

🔰 The marketing mix in the digital age

The “marketing mixes”, also called “the 4 Ps” of marketing, are considered the foundation of your marketing plan. They represent the main decisions you will have to make when marketing your products or services:

✔️ Product 

What will your product or service actually be and how does it meet your customer's needs?

✔️ Price  

At what price will you set your product? This is not always a monetary figure, as customers can trade their time or information for a “free” product.

✔️ Location 

How do you deliver the product to the customer? Do they come into a physical store or do you sell online? Are you targeting a specific geographic region?

✔️ Promotion 

What marketing methods will you use to get your product known to the world?

Getting the marketing mix right means you'll be able to align with your customers' wants and needs, build your brand presence, and maximize your return on investment.

The concept of 4P marketing mix was thought of long before the Internet became a part of normal daily life, but it can be adapted quite easily to form the basis for developing a marketing strategy in today's digital world. In the digital marketing mix, the 4Ps are the same, but the approach is different.

✔️ Product 

The Internet means you can have a business without physical inventory. Instead, you can sell digital products like eBooks and courses. Even if you sell tangible products, the product development process has changed forever.

It is now possible to order and create on-demand products to test the market first, and the ability to survey your customers quickly and easily means you're less likely to make mistakes when it comes to product development.

✔️ Price 

Digital marketing technology means you don't have to decide on a single price for your product or service – you can dynamically adjust the price based on who is looking at it.

There's also more flexibility when it comes to pricing models, with subscriptions and recurring payments made more accessible to businesses and customers of all kinds.

✔️ Location 

Clearly the main difference here is that you are selling online rather than in a physical store. But there are also many different channels to explore when it comes to selling online. Your own website, online marketplaces, email, and social media are all avenues to consider.

✔️ Promotion

Again, you will still be promoting your product, but the methods are different than you would have used 30 years ago. Instead of direct mail and print advertising, your strategy can include email marketing and on social networks.

For any concerns, leave me a comment. But before you leave, you affiliate accelerator which allows you to generate your first 1000 euros in affiliation in one month.