What Are the Basics of Marketing?

Marketing is a process of discovering new opportunities and creating solutions. Marketing involves the careful study of your customer’s needs and preferences. Marketing includes numerous activities such as research, analysis, evaluation, designing and testing. It is an important component of business strategy. Marketing is the “language of business” and helps to shape consumer perceptions of a product, service or organisation. Marketing is a generic term that describes any action that helps to advertise and market a product or service.

marketing

Marketing is a set of processes used to acquire, manage, maintain and deliver markets with the help of other people and organisations. Marketing is a term that implies planning, developing, managing, maintaining and delivering markets with the assistance of others. Marketing is used to derive ideas for new products and services, to generate public awareness, to promote existing products and services, to decrease product or service costs and to increase sales. The term is generally used to refer to those marketing activities that do not involve physical distribution. Marketing therefore includes the process by which organisations develop customer satisfaction, establish a competitive advantage and create value for their customers.

Marketing is a systematic approach to obtaining markets. It is the most significant activity of all, because it is the basis of virtually all other activities in a business. It should be considered the pivot between planning and implementing activities and therefore the first item in any marketing management system should be an orientation of the organisation to the customer. The customer is at the heart of every business activity. The marketing concept consists of three elements: Identification, Development and Control. These three aspects are not easy to discuss, but a brief description of each can be provided.

Identification is the process of finding suitable markets, defining the scope of those markets and creating a concept map of how the product will meet up with the targeted need. Marketers need to be familiar with the competition before choosing a concept or marketing strategy. They also need to determine how customers perceive a product or service. All this information will be available from market surveys or from studying the past performance of the customers. Marketers can use the information to improve their strategy and, therefore, their effectiveness.

Next, marketers need to develop a concept map, based on the customer profile, so that they can decide how to advertise the product. Keyword marketing is one way of developing such a concept map and marketers often use other methods as well, like local and Internet advertising strategies. They may choose to adopt a single keyword for the whole campaign or use keyword combinations for the different steps in the marketing strategy.

Finally, marketers have to control and allocate resources effectively. This will involve assessing the marketing efforts for profit and, if necessary, budgeting additional funds for them. The success of the marketing effort depends on the ability of the marketers to identify the right consumer group, whom they can advertise to effectively. Some marketers find it useful to use different marketing strategies for different segments of consumers. For instance, they can target young audiences or groups with disposable income. The same strategy may not work for both groups of consumers at the same time, but when they do, they will experience different results.