What is Marketing?
If we start from English, marketing means putting on the market!
Let’s delve deeper into the concept by taking advantage of some expert definitions that seem perfect.
Marketing is the activity of creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging an offer that has value for customers, partners, and society.
The discipline involves all the actions that a company undertakes to acquire customers and keep them.
Selling more stuff to more people more often for more money more efficiently.
The science and art of understanding, creating, and offering value to serve customers and make a profit.
As you can see, reference is always made to making a profit.
In doing so, it is necessary to be efficient and effective in all the processes that the company carries out to create value and offer it to the customer.
Customer-centric! Always.
Customers can be different:
- B2B
- B2C
- Services
- Institutional / Political Entities
- B2E Business to Employees
Let’s start by delving into the subject by defining the famous 4Ps.
They are a framework that includes the foundations of all marketing, they are 4 essential factors that define the company’s marketing itself.
- Product: what is the product I want to sell? A unique selling proposition is what makes my product unique.
- Place: where I want to sell my products/services, physical/online, which countries.
- Price: how much my buyers are willing to pay for it.
- Promotion: This is Communication.
Having defined these four pillars of marketing, it is necessary to create a structure in order to define and lay down a plan that allows for attracting new customers, retaining current ones, and selling with high margins.
To do this, marketing is structured into 3 macro-families that work in unison.
Strategic Marketing
The strategic part is one that deals with directing the company in the desired direction. It defines the target clientele and the type of product. To do this, it relies largely on the result of the analytical sector. Once the strategy has been defined, it interfaces with the operational part for execution.
I know, often the opposite happens, the company has already created the product, then marketing is consulted to “sell it”.
The strategic part defines what kind of company you want to have, and consequently what kind of target to attack.
Once the target has been defined, it is important to remember that we can roughly segment it in this way:
- 3% Ready to Buy: these are people already ready to buy, usually very strong communication is always made with them;
- 17% Researching: they are still looking for a solution to their problem/need;
- 20% Problem Aware: they know they have a problem/need but haven’t identified it correctly yet;
- 60% Not Aware: they don’t even know they have a problem/need;
Analytical Marketing
It is the part that deals with numbers, and carries out studies on:
- market;
- customers;
- competitors;
In addition to carrying out analysis before the production of a new product, it deals with studying and producing reports concerning the number of products on sale or, for example, A|B tests, informative campaigns, etc.
All reports are then used by the strategic sector to maximize earnings.
Operational Marketing
This part deals with translating strategy into practical actions, based on the assigned budget. Once the target has been defined, it is necessary to understand how to have the best impact on it, and which tools to use.
The choices are varied:
- means
- channel
- tone of voice
- copywriting
- type of content
The mix of choices can lead to very different results, which lead the product to have poor/good/excellent revenues.
The numbers of the different campaigns/initiatives of the operational part must be analyzed by the analytical part to understand their effectiveness and efficiency and to be able to improve processes and decisions taken.
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