What Is Marketing? Definition, Strategies And Examples

Marketing is a process by which organizations can create awareness, interest, and demand for their products or services through personal one-on-one communications, mass media, digital media, promotions, events, sponsorships, advertising campaigns, public relations activities, and other means. The key to successful marketing is understanding what market needs your product meets.

Successful marketing combines customer data with insights about how customers' behaviors drive the need for different products. Marketing professionals research trends and analyze demographic data to understand what consumers value in their products. This information is used to identify potential markets for new products and reach the right audiences with the appropriate messages.

What Is Marketing

Having a thorough grasp of the basics of marketing can get you on the right track. Collecting information, like collecting lead data for sales and direct marketing, can help you know the personal data of your customers.

Understanding how your customers use the products you make can help you understand how your products fit into their lives and what they would pay for them. Identify the types of people and companies your target market would most likely buy your products and how you would reach them with your product and advertising.

Linking marketing activities to the demographics of your customers will make it easier to analyze how much or little you are reaching your audience and what you need to do to get more customers.

Marketing Strategies

• Reach new audiences.

• Start with current customers and get their feedback on your current products or services.

• Market to specific demographics, usually defined by various household income, age, and marital status.

• Make the most of the value proposition of your product to stay relevant to current customers.

• Get new customers to "play" with your product by sponsoring events, donating, or sponsoring promotions.

• Get new customers to "make a choice" by offering free trials and discounts.

• Marketing Solutions

• The market for different demographics.

• Customize your message to the different niches of customers with different lifestyles, demographics, and interests.

• Send targeted emails to consumers who fit your audience, including those who share information about themselves online.

Marketers Must Understand Demographics

To understand consumers, marketers need to understand demographics such as age, gender, and income levels. This is the information that helps marketers determine how well products meet the needs of a particular market segment. The goal is to identify customers who would purchase products based on how well the product meets their needs.

If there are few potential customers for the product, it's unlikely that the product will succeed. If there are many potential customers, then you're likely to create a product that does not meet the needs of many potential customers.

Marketing Is More Than Ads

Marketing strategies are not limited to print and broadcast advertisements. Social media, mobile technologies, wearables, augmented reality, and other innovations in technology have radically changed the way businesses attract and influence buyers.

As a result, some analysts predict an end to print advertising. In fact, many advertisers have even moved away from national marketing campaigns and toward local and targeted marketing to support their local communities.

If you haven't already, you should check out the infographic below on marketing strategies to better understand the role it plays in a business.

Knowing Your Target Audience

Marketing experts understand how the psyche of their target audience works and who they want to be. These factors influence marketing plans, direct mailing, market research, advertising, graphic design, marketing campaigns, and research.

Audiences want what they can't have. They demand their likes, dislikes, and desires to be fulfilled through communication with others. Therefore, companies need to understand how their consumers behave to ensure that their marketing campaign is effective. 

Examples of Successful Marketing Campaigns

In 2009, when the retail chain Kmart announced that they would eliminate their checkout lane scanner in order to comply with the government's microchip mandate, shoppers flooded their stores, demonstrating the frustration over losing a consumer-friendly feature they had been enjoying for years.

The response led the company to issue an apology and raise the possibility of a return of the scanner.

In a similar case, Apple Inc. ran television ads aimed at persuading reluctant parents to get their children one of their latest products, the iPad.