Marketing Basics

Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large. A market is an arrangement between a seller and a buyer in which:

• The seller agrees to supply the goods or the service.
• The buyer agrees to pay the price.

Defined this way, the market is not necessarily a geographical location. Products and services are purchased over the phone, through mail and electronic mail, as well as through the online.  For any organisation, marketing makes the economy strong and stable.  The lesser the stress on the marketing function, the weaker will be the economy. Marketing is complex mechanism involving many people in one form or the other. The major marketing functions are buying, selling, financing, transport, warehousing, risk bearing and standardization, etc. In each such function different activities are performed by a large number of individuals and bodies.

Marketing strategy is the comprehensive plan formulated particularly for achieving the marketing objectives of the organization. It provides a blueprint for attaining these marketing objectives. It is the building block of a marketing plan. It is designed after detailed marketing research. A marketing strategy helps an organization to concentrate it scarce resources on the best possible opportunities so as to increase the sales.

Importance of Marketing Strategy

• Marketing strategy provides an organization an edge over it’s competitors.
• Strategy helps in developing goods and services with best profit making potential.
• Marketing strategy helps in discovering the areas affected by organizational growth and thereby helps in creating an organizational plan to cater to the customer needs.
• It helps in fixing the right price for organization’s goods and services based on information collected by market research.
• Strategy ensures effective departmental co-ordination.
• It helps an organization to make optimum utilization of its resources so as to provide a sales message to its target market.
• A marketing strategy helps to fix the advertising budget in advance, and it also develops a method which determines the scope of the plan, i.e., it determines the revenue generated by the advertising plan.

Marketing is not just one single strategy, but rather a combination of many different techniques and tactics. Below listed  are  some essential marketing strategies that are popular

Marketing Plan: Discover what a marketing plan is, why you need to design one, and the keys to creating a strong plan. Without a marketing plan, a company or brand can’t reach its goals.

Digital Marketing: Digital marketing is the discipline of marketing which focuses on developing a strategy solely within the digital environment.

Direct Marketing: Direct marketing is a type of campaign based on direct, two-way communication that seeks to trigger a result from a specific audience.

Email Marketing: Email Marketing is one of the most profitable and effective techniques in terms of return. Naturally, it consists of sending emails to your audience, but make sure to define your segments well in order to be effective.

Mobile Marketing: Mobile Marketing is a broad concept which brings together all marketing campaigns and actions focused exclusively on mobile platforms and applications (i.e. smartphones and tablets).

Viral Marketing: Having something go viral is every company’s dream. Viral Marketing spreads from one person to the next and is capable of going incredibly far incredibly fast.

Performance Marketing: Performance Marketing is a methodology which applies various marketing methods and techniques and guarantees advertisers that they only have to pay for achieved results.

Inbound Marketing: This methodology focuses on creating valuable content to attract qualified traffic and work towards the final sale.