What is “Marketing”?

So often we hear people using Marketing & Advertising interchangeably and this REALLY gets us going, so here’s the rant …

Marketing is creating a cohesive strategy for the following areas of your business, to ensure all parts work together to help you position yourself and make sales:

• Product/Service

• Price

• Place/Distribution

• Promotion

  • paid advertising

  • PR

  • sales promotions

  • direct marketing

  • personal selling

As you can see, marketing is so much more than just advertising or even promoting your business. When you craft each of the elements above so they work together, everything just clicks and makes sense; oh, and you make more money because of it!

We can’t talk about marketing without a big plug for marketing research. Data is king. Do not make decisions based on:

• what you assume to be the case

• anecdotal information from friends, family & fellow business owners

• “known” norms that everyone believe to be true

• what you’ve seen in one or two cases that may not represent the situation as a whole

Marketing research is a BIG part of what we do and is why we feel confident about our choices and recommendations. Yes, we do TONS of research in many areas, but you can do the basics on your own. Do your digging into the following areas and you’ll be off to the races:

• industry trends

• market trends

• competition

• businesses outside of your market that you aspire to be like or are disrupting the industry

• target market

Finally, marketing shouldn’t be a mystery and any professional marketer that tries to make it seem that way is duping you. Yes, it can get VERY complicated at a high level, just like any profession, but you should be able to understand the basics of what’s being done for you and should definitely understand the impact that it made on your business. If you come away from a marketing spend going “they showed me lots of positive numbers and advertising results, but I’m not sure what it did for my business or roughly what my ROI was”, that wasn’t the right strategy or fit for you.

At the end of the day, Marketing shouldn’t be kept in a silo; it should be a part of every aspect of your business …. and it should MAKE YOU MONEY. We’re on a mission to take the mystery out of marketing so if you have any questions, feel free to ask!