Most people think marketing is just a fancy word for advertising. It isn’t.
I was at a backyard BBQ recently, dodging rogue water balloons, when someone asked what I do. I told them I run a marketing agency. They smirked and said, “Oh, cool. So you run Facebook ads and make logos?”
I nearly dropped my tongs. Over the sounds of screaming kids and sizzling carne asada, I had to explain the actual scope of my work in under two minutes.
The Whole Enchilada
Advertising is just another tortilla in the stack, and rarely the top one. A professional marketing strategy comes into play long before you even open your doors for business.
The American Marketing Association’s official definition of Marketing: 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.
Whether it is a physical product, a service-based business, or a restaurant’s dining experience, it all starts with your offering. But an offering is much more than a price tag. What we’re really talking about here is a thing called value.
In marketing, we consider value to include your customer’s time, energy, emotions, and financial investment in consuming your offering. With that in mind, several aspects of your business will need to be considered while developing your overall strategy.
Upgrading the Playbook
In the digital marketing world, you will hear a lot about the 4 P’s:
- Product: What you are actually selling, whether that is a tangible item or an hour of your time.
- Price: What you charge for it, and the strategy behind why it costs that much.
- Place: Where the actual transaction goes down, like a physical counter or an online shopping cart.
- Promotion: The tactics you use to get the right eyeballs on your offer.
However, modern, full-scale marketing requires the 7 P’s. We take the original four and add a few crucial reality checks:
- People: Because you need actual, competent humans building, selling, and supporting your brand.
- Process: How much does a customer have to fight through just to hand you their money, receive their product, or receive help post-delivery?
- Physical Evidence: The tangible proof that you aren’t a scam. These can be customer reviews or testimonials, press coverage, security badges on your website, or a host of similar elements.
The Disciplines
Because the field is so massive, executing it properly requires an understanding of several distinct disciplines:
- Market Research: Digging into the data to find out what buyers actually want before a single dollar is spent on production.
- Product Marketing: Turning a random napkin sketch into a viable, sellable item. This is also directly tied to the discipline of supply chain management (a.k.a. where you get all your stuff).
- Public Relations (PR): Actively managing a public reputation.
- Brand Strategy: Architecting a visual and emotional identity so you don’t look like everyone else.
- Digital Marketing: Driving traffic and managing the online ecosystem.
Why Your Partner Matters
Big corporations have 50-person marketing departments. Small businesses don’t. But you still need all those same gears to turn.
You can totally hire a teenager to run your social media. But keep in mind, social media is primarily “push marketing” (I broke this down in my What is Digital Marketing? post here). It is not the automatic lead-generating machine you might think it is, and a poorly run account can do serious damage to your reputation.
If you are bringing in a consultant, they need both a formal marketing education and real-world entrepreneurial experience. You want someone who knows the textbook theories but also has the operational scars of running their own business. When they can see the whole board, you get a real business partner, not just a graphic designer.
The carne asada was almost burning by the time I finished my rant. But, my buddy definitely walked away with a new respect for the craft.
