Marketing Basics
Marketing Basics
Cultivating a strong marketing orientation is essential as it assists a company in becoming more competitive.
Marketing is everyone's responsibility
Marketing helps create and sustain the customer relationships that are vital to your organization’s success. As such, marketing is everyone’s job—not just the responsibility of one department or a group of experts.
A company can become and remain more competitive by enabling and cultivating a marketing orientation. A solid marketing strategy enables a company to:
- Understand the customer
- Satisfy the customer’s wants and needs
- Create awareness and interest around its products, services, or ideas.
Marketing's roles
A marketing strategy is built to define and enhance several communication functions of the company, such as:
Branding
Advertising
Public relations
Social media
Knowing how these functions can work together is key, as this way a company is able to build and maintain a comprehensive marketing strategy and approach.
Marketing - external & internal
To an extent, marketing is thought of strictly as an “outward” activity that refers to all efforts to persuade customers to buy a product or a service. However, a marketing strategy and marketing skills can be used internally as well. An overall, comprehensive, external and internal marketing mindset helps a company to effectively approach its clients and customers and at the same time its own people and teams. Through a good internal marketing approach, a company can better identify and understand the needs of its people and create solutions for them, as well as communicate persuasively with them and for them. One might say that a company's people and teams are actually its first audience, as they won’t support its efforts if they don’t feel inspired and engaged by its vision.
To market a new idea or project:
Emphasize values and beliefs to build emotional connections - rather than just stating facts.
Do something unexpected to creatively capture people’s attention and imagination.
Design materials to fit the purpose and go beyond emails, memos, and PowerPoint presentations to share information.
Have fun in the process, as people remember messages better when humor is involved.
