Marketing. What is it, exactly? You know you need it, but what does that really mean?

Is it advertising? PR? Events? Social media?

It’s all of those things and more, but at its core, marketing is about understanding your audience and creating campaigns that speak to them in a way that gets them to take action.

Marketing can be complex, but with the right knowledge and approach, it can also be a powerful tool for growth. So let’s take a closer look at what marketing is and how you can use it to achieve your business goals.

What Is Marketing?

The Definition of Marketing

The purpose of marketing is to get your product in front of people who want to buy it. This could be through adverts in magazines, posts on social media, a page of your website appearing in search results, a TV ad or someone using a tote bag with your logo on it — the possibilities are endless.

But endless possibilities can feel a bit daunting. Don’t worry; that’s what this guide is here for.

The Different Types of Marketing

Marketing is a broad industry made up of many different methods. The main methods are traditional, outbound, inbound and digital marketing.

Traditional Marketing

Traditional marketing is an umbrella term for any marketing activity not done online, including printed adverts in newspapers and magazines, billboards, flyers and letters. It also includes radio and TV adverts.

Just because it’s called “traditional” marketing doesn’t make it a dying form of marketing. In the UK, people watch an average of 22.5 hours of TV per week, not including streaming services like Netflix, and 9.5 million adults in the UK listen to the radio.

Digital Marketing

Digital marketing is the opposite of traditional marketing and includes any marketing activity you do online. The different types of digital marketing include your website, content marketing, search engine optimisation, social media, pay-per-click ads, influencer marketing, video marketing, digital PR, affiliate marketing and email marketing.

Outbound Marketing

Outbound marketing is any marketing activity where the business starts a conversation with a potential customer. It often involves sending a marketing message to a large number of people. This includes TV ads, direct mail, events, paid social ads, newspaper ads and more.

Outbound marketing can sometimes get a bad rep because of cold-calling and spam email marketing, which are seen as an invasion of privacy. To do outbound marketing well, you should avoid contacting people on phone numbers or email addresses they haven’t directly given to you.

Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing refers to marketing efforts that result in people finding your business through a search — a search for a type of product or service or a search for an answer to a question.

Inbound marketing is made up of content such as blogs, videos, guidebooks, training guides, social media, digital PR, affiliate marketing, paid search ads, email marketing and more.

Email marketing only counts as inbound if the person receiving the emails actively signed up to your mailing list.

What’s the Difference between Marketing and Advertising?

What’s the Difference between B2B Marketing and B2C Marketing?

Other types of marketing you may have come across are B2B marketing (business to business) and B2C marketing (business to consumer).

Business to business is where you, a business, sell products to other businesses. Businesses themselves are your customers.

Business to consumer is where you are selling to consumers. This could be directly, known as direct-to-consumer (D2C) or through a third party, such as a store or shopping site (not your own website).

The marketing strategies for B2B and B2C marketing are often different, as you need to take a different approach while speaking to consumers than you do when speaking to a business.

The marketing channels you use will often be different, as will your tone of voice and branding.

How Marketing Works

Marketing works by sharing your product or service with people who will benefit from your offering in a way that connects with them.

If all your ideal customers are social media natives who never read newspapers, then spending your marketing budget on newspaper ads won’t work. However, if you create content for social media that looks like it belongs on the platform and combine that with an easy-to-use website, your marketing has a better chance of working.

In order to make your marketing work for you, you need to take the fundamentals of marketing into consideration, especially the seven Ps.

What Are the Seven Ps of Marketing?

The Seven Ps of marketing are made up of:

• Product
• Price
• Place
• Promotion
• People
• Process
• Physical Evidence.

These seven elements work together to inform your marketing strategy, from how much you charge for your product or service to the physical evidence you have to show why people should buy your product or service.

Having these seven Ps clear in your mind will help inform your wider marketing mix.

The Benefits of Marketing

The benefits of marketing are huge. Not only can marketing help you make more sales, but it also helps you set yourself apart in your industry and build a name for your business.

We all have businesses we think of when we hear certain products mentioned, whether that’s Nike for trainers or Tesla for electric cars. This is all down to strong branding and a great marketing strategy — you’ve seen enough about these brands that they pop into your head when thinking about certain products.

Overall, if you don’t market your business, it’s going to be very difficult for anyone to find out about you, let alone buy from you.

But if you market your business correctly, you can set yourself up as a thought leader in your industry, establish your business’ brand and authority, earn trust from consumers and, of course, get leads and sales for your business.

How to Create a Successful Marketing Campaign

All good marketing campaigns start with a marketing strategy. The campaign is the idea behind the marketing activities, and the strategy is how you will bring that idea to life.

This strategy should take into account your sales funnel, your target audience and your marketing goals. These elements will help you focus your marketing efforts in the right places.

You also need to decide which marketing channels you want to use for your campaign. These will again depend on your target audience and marketing goals. One campaign might perform best if you focus on one channel, and another will do best if you take a multi-channel approach.

Potential marketing channels include:

• Digital Marketing
• Affiliate Marketing
• Search Engine Optimisation
• Performance Marketing
• Event Marketing
• Account-based Marketing
• Social Media Marketing
• Content Marketing.

If you’re unsure where to start, you can always conduct a competitor marketing analysis to give you an idea of the type of content your competitors are sharing.

Once you’ve identified your marketing channels, you need to decide on the type of content you will produce for each channel. Depending on your target audience, you may benefit from written content, imagery, video content or something different.

When your marketing campaign comes to an end, you need to analyse the results to see what worked well and what didn’t and create a report. This will help you improve all future marketing campaigns.

What’s Next?

You should have a better understanding of what marketing is, how it works and the elements that go together to create a solid marketing strategy. Next, take a look at:

• Get your financials in order and plan a marketing budget from scratch
• Learn about the best B2B marketing strategies or the best B2C strategies
• Google or Bing — the battle of two search engines. Learn which is best for traffic.