What Are The Basics Of Marketing - Every Business Owner Should Know

This article is an introduction to marketing for small-business owners, solopreneurs, and beginner marketers. Our goal is to help you understand the key concepts of marketing without unnecessary jargon.

What is marketing?

Here’s how the American Marketing Association (which reviews the definition every three years to keep it timely) defines it:

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.

Why is marketing important?

Businesses transfer (sell) goods or services to customers in exchange for value (money). Sounds easy. But here’s what can go wrong for a business:

The customer may not know about the product/service.
Even if they know it, they may not have a desire for it.
Even if they know and have a desire for it, they may choose to buy from another business.
Even if a business manages to go through all the steps to transfer its goods, the customer may not be satisfied enough to come back, but again, or recommend the business to others.

The four Ps of marketing

So now we know what marketing is and why it is important. But what does marketing actually do? What are the main roles or key areas of marketing?

For decades, marketers have been answering these questions with the four Ps of marketing:

Product – What you sell
Price – How much do you sell it for
Place – Where you sell it
Promotion – How you get customers

Introduction to the types of marketing

Marketing is a business challenge that has more than one solution. These different solutions are the types of marketing. And these are no secrets in the industry—companies copy and remix them all of the time.

The key lies in choosing the optimal combination of these types and using them well. Let’s take a look at some examples.

B2B and B2C marketing

These acronyms stand for business-to-business marketing and business-to-consumer marketing, respectively.

Marketers often differentiate these solutions because some tactics are more effective for marketing to businesses and others for marketing to consumers. Even the messaging style differs.

Inbound and outbound marketing

Another pair of basic marketing types that can be used to describe most marketing tactics is inbound and outbound marketing.

The first one is about “pulling the customer in” by, for example, providing helpful content to the prospect when they’re ready.

The latter is about pushing the offering to the customer with an “interrupting” message, e.g., advertising.

Content marketing

Content marketing is the process of creating and distributing content to attract and retain customers. By content, I mean blog posts, podcasts, videos, infographics, ebooks, etc.

Promotion through content marketing usually involves satisfying a prospect’s need (e.g., the need to solve a problem at work, the need for entertainment, etc.) while giving exposure to the product or brand.

Email and social media marketing

Email and social media, although quite different from each other, share a similar idea for marketing: gather an audience and use an owned marketing channel for direct messaging.

Growth marketing

The last type of marketing I want to talk about is a rather new addition to the “family.” Growth marketing is the process of increasing a company’s revenue by applying an experiment-driven and integrated approach to all stages of attracting customers.

So instead of simply copying what’s working for other marketers or focusing on one marketing channel, growth marketers devise hypotheses and then verify them through data from marketing experiments.