What’s Marketing? How Can I Explain It To You?

Marketing as you’ll learn from this presentation is important to your entire business irrespective of your function because virtually every member of your team is a marketer. So, marketing is very important whether you’re in the marketing function or any other function in the organization.

This presentation has been designed primarily to drive a clear awareness of marketing being an “alpha beyond omega” of your business. It will make you see why marketing should be incorporated at the core of every business decision or action you take.

My perspective & explanations definitely will enlighten you about how marketing has deviated from product-focused to customer-centric and solution-oriented approach especially in this our communication technology world.

How Best Can I Explain What Marketing Means In This Modern World?

Of course, we all know that marketing deals with the actions or business of promoting and selling products or services. I’ve come to realize that the straightforward definitions of marketing aren’t actually about the reality in it. Hence, I’ll break down for you as I explain with my own headlines:

Marketing is Everything About Your Business

Your business is brought about because you’ve the desire to add value and gain something equivalently valuable in return of what you’ve to offer. Marketing starts from the moment you innovate an idea of what value you bring to the market, when you think about what you’ll produce it, goes through when you manipulate such product, offer it to your target market, and then beyond when you must’ve sold it in exchange of something invaluable (e.g. money).

Most times, you have the idea of what you intend to offer but you may not have all needed resources to push it forward, hence you’ll likely involve an investor. Convincing an investor to sponsor your production process requires marketing. It’s not just about ideating an invaluable product but about persuading people to foresee the value of your business idea to the extent that they choose to invest in it. You now see that you haven’t yet started your business but you’re already marketing for it. What about if you successfully convert your idea into a new product, how do you push it into the competitive market and get your target buyers to learn about it? Well, your product put aside! What about your entire business? Can it ever grow without marketing?

I also define Marketing as “Alpha Beyond Omega” of Your Business

Infact, let me just say this; Your business can’t live without marketing because marketing is the blood that circulates within every of your business systems powering its successes.

Marketing already started influencing your business even before it’s launched and this is why I relate it to “Alpha” of your business. Being “Beyond Omega” implies that marketing determines whether or not your business will succeed with trend despite all manners of challenges and threat you’ll face. Marketing lies before your business and goes far beyond it, hence your business only starts with no end when you incorporate marketing at its core.

Everyone in Your Business is a Marketer!

Everyone in your organization is a marketer since the major aim of your business is to grow as you consistently offer your solutions to satisfy market’s needs. Since you all work towards the same goal, everything you do must always incorporate at its core. Remember, marketing comprises of all you do to attract, engage and win your target buyers for an exchange process.

As a business person, you should focus on embedding marketing at the core of your business in such a way that everyone understands that he or she is a marketer, they should always keep it in mind irrespective of their functions because your business grows by satisfying your customers’ needs.

From The Beginning To The End of Sales Process is Marketing.

Marketing is different from advertising and promotions. It starts with understanding your target market following market researches, of which by analysing & segmenting them using certain variables gives you accurate consumers’ personas. Each segment’s consumer persona always helps in answering one question: “where”, “when” and “how” does your customer want to communicate with your business.

In MY First Definition of Marketing, I State as Follows:

“Marketing can be defined as the set of actions or processes carried out from an initiation of a product, via researching and identifying your future customers, to targeting and presenting such product in a way that your ultimate consumers choose the product over your competitors”.

From the above definition, you can understand that marketing starts and ends your customer’s buying cycle. If you fail to place your marketing at any stage of this cycle, you’ll be likely to lose the customer.

Marketing Sometimes Can Be Confused With Sales & Advertising

Most companies make the mistake of seeing marketing to be just “one” process. From above explanation so far, you understand that marketing is everything that goes on from the moment you innovated a product’s idea till producing it, to researching who your targets are, to reaching out to them, then goes as far as attributing to everything your targets feel when they learn about your business following your advertising to their perception, to the customer services they receive from you, till you sell the product and finally the follow-up care you provide after the purchase.

Now you see this: Without proper after sales attention, there may not exist strong word of mouth marketing for your products.

It’s all marketing that determines the decision within the customer whether or not to choose you initially or for repeat business. You can’t confuse marketing with sales or advertising because in all, there’s always marketing boosting each process. Marketing involves all the processes carried out to bring a product or service from its manufacturer or seller to the target consumers. It incorporates the concept behind the products and services, to identifying who’s likely to pay for it, promoting it and moving it through the proper selling channels.

This is Why Marketing Has Shifted From “4Ps Framework” To “SAVE Framework”

Traditional marketers have long be using the well known “4Ps of marketing mix model” to illustrate the stages of marketing. But in this modern world, marketing is no longer about what product or service you provide but what solution you offer via them.

It’s no longer about where you would want the customers to get the product but how the customer can directly acquire your solution with little or no stress, it’s no longer at what rate you want to offer such product but at what value your solution can offer to solve such customer’s need, and it’s finally no longer about how you promote your products & get it distributed to your customers but how you educate them to solve their needs using your product’s solution.

4Ps = SAVE

• 1st P: Product = Solution
• 2nd P: Place = Access
• 3rd P: Price = Value
• 4th P: Promotion = Education

Then In My Second Definition of Marketing, From The Above Explanation I’ll State That:

Marketing is all the actions or processes carried out to ensure that your solutions are carried from your product to the ultimate customers in need of it following researching, understanding, educating them and making it easy for them to acquire it over competitors, and then find the value of such product with respect to their needs, coupled with your customer services and after sales follow-up care.

In Conclusion:

Your business is all about your customers, marketing is everything about your business, the blood that circulates within every system of your business, the alpha beyond omega of your business and has deviated from the 4Ps framework to SAVE model because everything is focused on building your brand. Your brand is whatever that interacts with your customers’ emotions, wins such emotions and satisfies them to the extent that they refer more customers to you, at the end building a loyalty base of happy customers which will be the cornerstone of your business during future crisis.

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ABOUT JOSEPHINE UBA:

Josephine Uba as a marketing expert founded Kleensa Promotion, a digital marketing and branding company in Nigeria. In addition, she runs her dedicated marketing blog, ''www.josephineuba.com'' basically on digital Marketing, creative designing and branding to sustain both startup and individuals’ brand. She's a creative entrepreneur, corporate host, professional keynote speaker, tradeshow and spokesperson presenter. She continuously deep-dives into relevant researches to unveil insights and strategies, providing a well-structured guide to the channels, coupled with approaches that you will need to consider as you navigate the digital highway towards your business growth solutions.