What Is Marketing? Features of Marketing?

 What is Marketing?

Marketing refers to activities a company undertakes to promote the buying or selling of a product or service. Marketing includes advertising, selling, and delivering products to consumers or other businesses. Some marketing is done by affiliates on behalf of a company.
Professionals who work in a corporation's marketing and promotion departments seek to get the attention of key potential audiences through advertising. Promotions are targeted to certain audiences and may involve celebrity endorsements, catchy phrases or slogans, memorable packaging or graphic designs and overall media exposure.

Definition of Marketing Research

Marketing research is the function that links the consumer, customer, and public to the marketer through information—information used to identify and define marketing opportunities and problems; generate, refine, and evaluate marketing actions; monitor marketing performance; and improve understanding of marketing as a process. Marketing research specifies the information required to address these issues, designs the method for collecting information, manages and implements the data collection process, analyzes the results, and communicates the findings and their implications. (Approved 2017)

Product

Product refers to an item or items the business plans to offer to customers. The product should seek to fulfill an absence in the market, or fulfill consumer demand for a greater amount of a product already available. Before they can prepare an appropriate campaign, marketers need to understand what product is being sold, how it stands out from its competitors, whether the product can also be paired with a secondary product or product line, and whether there are substitute products in the market.

Promotion

In marketing, promotion refers to any type of marketing communication used to inform target audiences of the relative merits of a product, service, brand or issue, most of the time persuasive in nature. It helps marketers to create a distinctive place in customers' mind, it can be either a cognitive or emotional route.

Types of Marketing

Influencer Marketing

According to the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), influencer marketing focuses on leveraging individuals who have influence over potential buyers and orienting marketing activities around these individuals to drive a brand message to the larger market.

In influencer marketing, rather than marketing directly to a large group of consumers, a brand inspires or compensates influencers (which can include celebrities, content creators, customer advocates, and employees) to get the word out on their behalf.

Relationship Marketing

According to the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), relationship marketing refers to strategies and tactics for segmenting consumers to build loyalty.

Relationship marketing leverages database marketing, behavioral advertising and analytics to target consumers precisely and create loyalty programs. 

Viral Marketing

Viral marketing is a marketing phenomenon that facilitates and encourages people to pass along a marketing message.

Nicknamed “viral” because the number of people exposed to a message mimics the process of passing a virus or disease from one person to another.[1]

Green Marketing

Green marketing refers to the development and marketing of products that are presumed to be environmentally safe (i.e., designed to minimize negative effects on the physical environment or to improve its quality).

This term may also be used to describe efforts to produce, promote, package, and reclaim products in a manner that is sensitive or responsive to ecological concerns.

Keyword Marketing

Keyword marketing involves placing a marketing message in front of users based on the specific keywords and phrases they are using to search.

A key advantage of this method is that it gives marketers the ability to reach the right people with the right message at the right time. For many marketers, keyword marketing results in the placement of an ad when certain keywords are entered.

Note that in SEO, this term refers to achieving top placement in the search results themselves.

Guerilla Marketing

Guerilla marketing describes an unconventional and creative marketing strategy intended to get maximum results from minimal resources.

Outbound Marketing

Outbound marketing is a newer term for traditional marketing coined when the term inbound marketing came into popular use. 

In outbound marketing, the marketer initiates contact with the customer through methods such as TV, radio and digital display advertising. It is often used to influence consumer awareness and preference for a brand. 

Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing is marketing in which customers initiate contact with the marketer in response to various methods used to gain their attention. These methods include email marketing, event marketing, content marketing and web design.

One purpose of inbound marketing, which includes content marketing, is to establish the business as a source for valuable information and solutions to problems, thereby fostering customer trust and loyalty.

Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of developing a marketing/technical plan to improve visibility within one or more search engines. Typically, this consists of two elements.

On a technical side, SEO refers to ensuring that a website can be indexed properly by the major search engines and includes the use of the proper keywords, content, code, and links.

On the marketing side, SEO refers to the process of targeting specific keywords where the site should “win” in searches. This can be done by modifying a website to score well in the algorithms search engines use to determine rank, or by purchasing placement with individual keywords. Often, SEO programs are a blend of several elements and strategies. 

Content Marketing

Content marketing is a technique of creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience—with the objective of driving profitable customer action.

According to the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), content marketing involves various methods to tell the brand story. More and more marketers are evolving their advertising to content marketing/storytelling to create more stickiness and emotional bonding with the consumer.