Have you noticed how easy it is to get so wrapped up in the small details of day-to-day marketing that you miss out on the bigger picture?
We tend to know a lot about marketing, its strategies, and different aspects of it. But have you given a thought about why we actually do marketing? Or what is the purpose it serves of all marketing efforts taken? The first thought that crosses our mind is a simple answer which is: sell more. However, that’s not what marketing is, it’s much more than that.
You need to understand the core functions of marketing which will help you to better focus your strategies and efforts to support your business. Not to mention, it’ll make it a lot easier to show ROI and relevant KPIs if you exactly know what is expected to be delivered by the marketing department.
So without further ado, let’s dive into the functions of marketing. These 7 functions of marketing define the aspects of marketing and also take a look at how they influence the business objectives.
- Promotion
- Selling
- Product management
- Marketing information management
- Pricing
- Financing
- Distribution
Functions Of Marketing
1. Promotion
When people write down their marketing objectives, promoting the business is usually at the top of the marketing list. It is an effort to persuade, inform, or remind your prospective customers about your product or service. Getting your name on the minds of your potential customers, building brand awareness, and raising a company’s profile are the major priorities for every company’s marketing department.
Promotional strategies such as advertising and public relations often tend to overlap with many business units and awareness-building activities. From the marketing perspective, promotions include everything from content marketing and email marketing to influence marketing and social media.
2. Selling
We’ve often cautioned readers about the risks of approaching too strong and salesy together with your marketing content. You risk alienating your audience by consistently delivering overt sales pitches in your content and making it appear to be your only goal to urge people to shop for something from you.
The truth is a component of each marketer’s job is to sell their products to customers — ideally, though, it’s through with more nuance. Every marketing decision, from your brand messaging to your campaign themes, should support the last word goal of accelerating sales. Once you’ve grabbed the eye of a possible customer, whether that’s a consumer or B2B marketer, prospect got to attend work nurturing that lead and guiding them through the sales funnel so they’re primed to form a sale once they finally make contact together with your sales team.
That means continually making the case for your brand and gradually incorporating more product-centric talking points in your marketing communications. By the time they’re able to speak with a sales associate, prospects should be aware of how good your goods or services are against competing products.
3. Product management
Designing a replacement product that better meets customer needs and fills a niche within the marketplace doesn’t happen by coincidence or sheer luck. It takes tons of thorough marketing research to work out what people want and the way to deliver the simplest product possible. Marketing teams may identify new growth opportunities when:
- Talking to prospects
- Run competitor analysis
- Applying feedback that is given by customers support service into marketing strategies.
In those cases, market research is known as the fire that fuels development. And who better understands the market that you want to target than your marketing team?
4. Marketing information management
Strategic marketing is driven by data. Every good marketer knows that the more information you’ll gather about your target customer, industry competitors and market trends, the more successful your marketing efforts are going to be .
All of that juicy info is nearly as good as gold, so there’s no reason for keeping it locked away in some silo. The core (yet sometimes overlooked) function of selling is to gather this valuable data, distill it right down to action items and useful takeaways and share it with other departments which may find it useful.
Sales teams, as an example , can always use more in-depth marketing insights to assist them to refine their pitches to:
- Address the latest industry trends
- Respond to competitor messaging
- Speak directly to the pressing customer concerns
5. Pricing
Marketing research also can inform how brands set the worth of a product. Effective pricing is as an art as it is science, and makes you find that sweet spot that balances how customers value your goods or services with the value of production and delivery also as accounting for the present price of competing products.
The perceived value of your brand directly impacts your pricing strategy — just check out the worth difference between a luxury fashion brand like Hermès and more budget-conscious retailers like Old Navy. The several thousand dollar tag disparities for one handbag can’t be chalked up to production costs and internal control alone. Hermes customers are paying the maximum amount for the brand as they’re the merchandise itself.
Marketing research sheds light on your brand’s reputation and helps you better understand what proportion your audience values your brand. That’s on top of all the competitor analysis and industry research critical to setting a good selling price for your wares.
6. Financing
Now we’re digging into a number of the less-discussed functions of selling, although they’re still vital to overarching business objectives. Financing might not initially appear to be a top concern for your marketing team to stress about, but believe it this way: If your department can’t secure space within the budget to completely support your next marketing campaign, how are you getting to meet your goals?
When people believe financing, they often specialise in the up-front costs of getting a replacement business off the bottom. But, actually, financing is an ongoing concern for business owners and company leaders, who have to make difficult budgeting decisions year after year and quarter after quarter.
By helping generate more revenue, expand into new markets and reach more potential customers, marketing teams can demonstrate their value to the organization at large which makes it easier to secure the financing they have on a departmental level. Effective marketing management is vital therein regard. A marketing program that gets the foremost value out of obtainable resources and applies the proper strategies to interact and nurture qualified leads can show undeniable ROI.
Successful marketing activity also helps businesses secure funding from third parties — say getting a loan from a bank or an investment from a risk capital firm. Any organization, whether it’s an independent firm or a financial organization, wants to ascertain that companies have a comprehensive marketing plan which will help build the brand, tap into markets and produce healthy revenue over the end of the day.
7. Distribution
“Distribution?” you’ll be asking yourself, “isn’t that providing chain management’s problem?”
Yes, but where you sell your products or services and the way you get them into your customer’s hands is additionally a marketing problem, whether you’re talking about digital or physical distribution.
Choosing the proper distribution channels comes right down to understanding who your target customer is, how they view your brand and where they expect to seek out you — all marketing-centric issues. you’d never expect to seek out a Rolex await sale at the Dollar Store, after all. Those brands represent two very different market demographics.
Marketing managers and their supply chain counterparts got to be aligned whenever a replacement product, promotion, or campaign is launched so companies can have all of their distribution ducks during a row. If marketers do their job well, they’re going to generate plenty of buzz leading up there to product releases or promotional events, pushing customer demand to the limit. That marketing win can quickly become a PR nightmare if the availability chain isn’t prepared to satisfy demand.
Wrap Up
Marketing touches most of all the parts of your business, and the insights gathered from your efforts can improve any number of daily operations, and also will guide long-term strategic decision-making.
Let’s head back to our first question which is “Why we actually do marketing?” It is to make our business successful. As these functions of marketing shows, you can go and achieve your marketing goal in many different ways, but the result will be the same.
