What exactly is marketing and why is it important to your business?
Marketing is everything you do to place your product/service in the hands of potential customers and clients.
It includes diverse disciplines like sales, public relations, pricing, packaging, and distribution.
You might think of marketing this way. If business is all about people and money and the art of persuading one to part from the other, then marketing is all about finding the right people to persuade.
Marketing is your strategy for allocating resources (time and money) in order to achieve your objectives (a fair profit for supplying a good product or service).
Marketing – the management process through which goods and services move from concept to the customer.
It includes the coordination of four elements:
identification, selection and development of a product
determination of its price
selection of a distribution channel to reach the customer’s place
development and implementation of a promotional strategy
Marketing is based on thinking about the business in terms of customer needs and their satisfaction. It is not concerned with the values that the exchange is all about. And it does not, as marketing invariable does, view the entire business process as consisting of a tightly integrated effort to discover, create, arouse and satisfy customer needs. Marketing has less to do with getting customers to pay for your product as it does developing a demand for that product and fulfilling a customer’s needs.
What is the difference between marketing and branding?
There is a spectrum of opinions here, Marketing is actively promoting a product or service.
It’s a push tactic.
It’s pushing out a message to get sales results
This is oversimplification
This is not branding
Branding should both precede and underlie any marketing effort.
Branding is not push, but pull
Branding is the expression of the essential truth or value of an organization, product, or service
It is communication of characteristics, values, and attributes that clarify what this particular brand is and is not
A brand will help encourage someone to buy a product, and it directly supports whatever sales or marketing activities are in play, but the brand does not explicitly say “buy me.” Instead, it says“This is what I am. This is why I exist. If you agree, if you like me, you can buy me, support me, and recommend me to your friends.”
Branding is Strategic. Marketing is Tactical.
Marketing may contribute to a brand, but the brand is bigger than any particular marketing effort. The brand is what remains after the marketing has swept through the room. It’s what sticks in your mind associated with a product, service, or organization—whether or not, at that particular moment, you bought or did not buy.
The brand is ultimately what determines if you will become a loyal customer or not. The marketing may convince you to buy a particular Toyota, and maybe it’s the first foreign car you ever owned, but it is the brand that will determine if you will only buy Toyotas for the rest of your life.
The brand is built from many things. Very important among these things is the lived experience of the brand. Did that car deliver on its brand promise of reliability? Did the maker continue to uphold the quality standards that made them what they are? Did the sales guy or the service center mechanic know what they were talking about?
Marketing unearths and activates buyers. Branding makes loyal customers, advocates, even evangelists out of those who buy.
This works the same way for all types of businesses and organizations. All organizations must sell (including non-profits). How they sell may differ, and everyone in an organization is, with their every action, either constructing or deconstructing the brand. Every thought, every action, every policy, every ad, every marketing promotion has the effect of either inspiring or deterring brand loyalty in whomever is exposed to it. All of this affects sales.
Branding is as vital to the success of a business or non-profit as having financial coherence, having a vision for the future, or having quality employees.
Media & Marketing
Your brand and message may be great
…but who is seeing it?
No matter how good your message is, if it doesn’t get in front of the right audience, then it is just a waste. Our CEO likes to say, “don’t advertise a pork chop sale to the pigs, advertise it to the pig farmers!” Media & Marketing is a main focus here. We not only focus on your message, but that its getting to the audience that will respond and be interested. The days of throwing mud at the side of the building and seeing what sticks is gone, now it is all about the ROI. Let us show you what our media department can do for you: research, media planning, marketing, placement and management.
