Marketing 101 / Introduction to Marketing

Many people get confused by the term marketing. To clear a common misconception up, marketing is not a synonym for sales. Sales is the process of selling a product or service, while marketing is the process of creating customers and keeping current customers. Sales is part of marketing, but it's not the bulk of it. Marketing covers a lot of things, advertising, promotions, publicity, public relations, customer service, and more. Surprisingly, many businesses don't think of marketing as an important process, but it is the most important part of running a business. After all, without customers, a business doesn't get money, and therefore goes bankrupt.

Marketing is a cycle, starting with research and ending with customer service (and then of course starting over again). The first step of the cycle is researching your product, your customer, and your competition, so you know exactly what you're selling, who you're selling it to, and who is trying to beat you. The next three steps relate to the product you are selling, and the first of those three (the second in the cycle) is developing the product itself, and making it fit the customers' needs. The next step is appropriately pricing the item, and the succeeding step is labeling and packing it. The fifth step of the marketing cycle is distribution, which is the means of which your business sells your product, whether it be through a store, the Internet, direct mail, or other direct selling methods. Next comes advertising, public relations, and promotions, which is how the product is made known to the public. Most important to all businesses is the seventh step in the cycle, which is sales, the phase where the product is finally sold and the business receives money. It doesn't end there though, there is one more step, which is customer service, which is if not the most important step in the cycle, one of the most important. Customer service is important because it is the means a business keeps existing customers while making them more loyal. It is easier to keep an existing customer than recruiting a new one, and it is approximately six times more expensive to attract a new customer than the cost of keeping a loyal one. Loyal customers are also good because they buy more of your products while referring new people to your business, bringing you new customers practically for free.

There are many different marketing methods, such as advertising, promotions, and publicity. Advertising is when somebody pays to show a certain product or their business as a whole in a mass media medium (like TV or a magazine). An example of a promotion is starting a sale (such as 10% of all products for Saturday), or driving your car around with a huge business sign on it. Publicity is when you get mentioned in the news for "free" (although many businesses spend a lot of money trying to achieve this, so it's not exactly free).

In marketing, it's important to know where you're going. Setting goals is important, because if you don't know where you're going, you don't know what strategy to set, and what tactics to employ. A strategy is the set of actions which lead to achieving your goal, and a tactic is each separate action which is used in your strategy. It is imperative that goals, strategies, and tactics are set, because if you market with no goal in sight, the result of your efforts will be disappointing and possibly disastrous.

An effective marketing strategy takes a lot of money, time, and effort, but if the plan is well-thought out and is set off right, it will most likely work. Before writing a strategy and employing it, colleagues and friends should be asked what they think about the plan and if they think it will work. If everybody thinks it's a good plan, and most importantly, you think it's a good plan, then it will most likely work.