Selling Your Goods: How to Improve Your Marketing Techniques

Marketing is described by Merriam Webster as the “practice of using creative methods to advertise and promote products and services.” It is a broad term that encompasses a variety of marketing strategies. Marketing can be directed at increasing brand awareness or establishing a personal relationship with customers. Marketing also involves research, development and the creation of a product or service. It also involves the collection of data for a purpose or someone. This data may be used to improve products and services, to obtain new customers, or to reduce costs.

The Evolution Of Marketing As A Concept

The concept of marketing evolved from the observation that some people can more easily be influenced than others, and that some customers’ needs are not able to be fulfilled by existing goods and services. Early marketing attempts focused on meeting these needs, but gradually the practice developed to include identifying those needs and seeking to meet them. Nowadays marketing even includes various attempts at creating content online and link building to ensure that the content reaches as wide an audience as possible. 

Marketing therefore, emerged from the practical application of the theory of value creation. By the mid nineteenth century, marketing was recognized as a separate field of study, separate from salesmanship, the study of selling. The two concepts were then combined into the more general term,’marketing’.

Defining Marketing Management

Marketing management is the science of defining, analyzing and creating markets. Marketers use marketing techniques to assess and improve the selling potential of their product, services or organizational setup. The marketing concept is designed to provide the tools, processes and technology for realizing a target market. In order for marketing to be successful, marketing activities should be coordinated and implemented by a set of specialized individuals who have knowledge, skills and experience in the field of marketing.

Marketing Research And Its Purpose

Marketing research seeks to uncover and define the needs of the buying public. Market research is conducted by companies by sending questionnaires to customers and prospecting potential purchases through advertising and other promotional activities. Marketing research can focus on many different aspects of selling like production, promotion, sales, distribution, financial status, customer preferences etc. However, the most important element of marketing research is gathering the information which is essential to the marketing activities of a company. Gathering this information can help marketers to develop and implement a strategy which can increase sales, generate customer loyalty and establish the company in a profitable niche.

Marketing Concept

Developing a marketing concept is the first step towards establishing the market and reaching the consumers. Creating a marketing concept means that a firm understands what type of things it sells and how customers use the internet to purchase those items. There are two basic marketing concepts that marketers should be familiar with; one is selling product, and the other is selling customer oriented concepts. The first marketing concept is the selling product. This will be the most important aspect of the marketing plan because it will determine how the firm plans to market its products.

A very important part of the selling concept is determining how the product should be categorized according to its physical makeup, its functional attributes, and how consumers perceive it. This is called product classification and it is considered to be an important marketing concept because it helps consumers to know what they want and identify what they need when making a purchasing decision. This concept is very important to a company because it determines whether or not a product matches the needs and requirements of a potential consumer. Consumers should also be able to easily identify the elements of the product that will make it easy for them to use. This leads to customer orientation, which is another key marketing concept.

Another aspect of this marketing concept is customer satisfaction. Satisfying customers is more likely to generate positive word of mouth advertisements and increase sales. Satisfied customers are more likely to return to that company because they are more likely to experience a positive product experience. This leads to customer loyalty and this concept is very important to marketing because loyalty means future purchases. Customers who are loyal will continue to purchase from that company and will give input on how products are being marketed.

Summary

Developing these concepts will help marketers come up with ideas about how they are going to sell their goods and whether or not they are selling-able products. The best way to determine whether a marketing strategy is working is to keep track of the statistics that are generated by the campaign. If the results are not coming in as expected, reevaluate the strategies that are being used. Remember that it takes time for any advertising effort to be effective and a company must be patient with any campaign if they want to get the best results. Be willing to change strategies and experiment with different advertising methods in order to get the best results.