Start with a Simple Marketing Definition
Our simple marketing definition is pretty practical; marketing is the umbrella for everything you’re doing to grow your business. And underneath that umbrella, you’ve got various components of your overall marketing strategy. If you want to get fancier about defining marketing, think of it as everything your business does to systematically attract and retain profitable customers.
Advertising
Advertising is just one aspect of marketing. Yet, the two terms get thrown around together all the time.
Great examples of advertising include everything from the sign on your storefront and your vans, to the more traditional forms of advertising you may use, like radio and television and now digital forms of advertising. But just limiting your simple marketing definition to “advertising” would be a mistake.
Promotion
Promotion can be another key aspect of marketing strategy. Essentially, promotion is meant to create urgency and focus attention on a specific product or service, or a specific timeframe (this weekend only), or both.
Great examples of promotion include themed sales events with a start and end. Restaurants do “kids eat free on Monday.” Grocery stores have specific items on sale this week only. Promotions generally center around an offer. And often these two components (advertising and promotion) can be combined for a powerful one, two punch. But advertising and promotion alone doesn’t exhaust the simple marketing definition.
Publicity
Some businesses use publicity more than others as part of their marketing strategies. Great examples of publicity might include sponsoring the high school booster club, making a donation to a local charity group, hosting a blood drive at your business, or having your team volunteer at a community event.
Publicity is often tactically designed to create awareness of your business. It’s less offer-driven, more brand-building. And publicity can be a great way to create “earned media,” meaning you can get articles and social media posts written about you.
Public Relations
Closely related to publicity is public relations, or PR. You can often combine publicity events with PR efforts, again creating that one, two punch for greater impact. Great examples of public relations might include having a ribbon cutting at your grand opening, receiving an award for community service, or participating in a chamber of commerce or industry event.
PR takes on many forms. It’s always best when you can relate a PR opportunity to your best customer prospects.
Sales
Anytime you’re detailing products and services, providing “feature and benefit” conversation, answering questions from prospective customers, demonstrating products, offering pricing estimates, or engaged in selling — that’s the sales function within marketing.
Often, people separate the idea of sales and marketing. However, in today’s environment everything you do as part of your marketing strategy should ultimately be accountable to, and contribute to, sales growth.
When all other aspects of marketing are coordinated with the sales function, businesses are more successful. They grow faster and more efficiently. Sales should definitely be considered part of the simple marketing definition; but it’s not the total picture as you can see.
When You Put It All Together in an Organized Way, That’s Marketing
So that simple marketing definition is really just an umbrella term for a host of tactical components that formulate your marketing strategy. As small business owners, we often have bits and pieces of this happening but we don’t have it all coordinated.
You may be really good at one or two aspects of marketing, but you lack the time and expertise to really get out of the weeds and see your marketing from a 10,000-foot view. Effective marketing isn’t about guesswork. And it’s not about creativity alone. It’s an organized, intentional effort that identifies your target audience, delivering a clear, concise message that resonates with them, and connects them to build long-term relationships. We detail this with our Simple Marketing Formula here at Source Local Media.
Read More: Marketing 101
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