Intro to Small Business Marketing

As many of you may know, marketing is essential for all types of businesses. From conglomerates to mom and pop stores, marketing plays a vital role in the success of a business. However, many of people may not be fully aware of the true concepts of marketing. I will be addressing some key concepts here and in future blog posts. For now, I’ll begin with the definition of marketing and how marketing is used in small businesses.

What is marketing?

The term “marketing” will have a different definition for each person you ask. The actual definition of marketing is – the process of how you create and keep your clients. Marketing contains all of the necessary steps you take to tailor your products and/or services, messages, customer service, and all other business tasks to satisfy your clients. Marketing is only successful if it contains two-way communication. Without effective two-way communication, your marketing process has not been successful and your business could suffer.

How does marketing work?

Think of marketing as a circle - there's no beginning and no end. Each time you or your company introduce a new product and/or service, your marketing process begins. This process is followed through to the client's purchase and begins again with the next client. There are 8 functions or deliverables of the marketing process:

1. Customer, Product and Competitive research
2. Product development
3. Pricing
4. Labels and packaging
5. Distribution
6. Advertising, promotions, and public relations
7. Sales
8. Customer service

Each of these deliverables are equally important and it's not wise to skip 1 or 2 to move through the process quickly. If steps are skipped, your business will have to deal with the consequences. These consequences could be that your products and/or services aren't selling as you expected them to or your list of clients isn't as established as you would like.

Common marketing misconception

If you ask 10 people to define the term marketing, you may find that about half of those people will tell you it's just a fancy term for sales. This is a common misconception. Marketing is not sales. Although sales is part of the marketing process, sales alone can never replace it. Sales is the act of communicating your marketing message. For example, if you see an advertisement for a large furniture sale, you've just received the company's marketing message. However, when you walk into the furniture store and purchase a new cocktail table, the salesperson effectively communicated the company's marketing message, offered the product and then you made your purchasing decision. That's sales - not marketing.

This is just the tip of the iceberg for marketing. I will be posting more entries in the future regarding the rest of the marketing process so stay tuned.