Marketing is an unavoidable part of operating any type of business. And it has been like that since ancient times. If you want to sell something, you want the buyer to know the product exists, you have it and buying from you, compared to the others selling similar products, is the right choice. These are pretty much what marketing covers. Whether it’s pre, post-production or the work that goes into the product creation process, marketing is involved in every step of the way. But what are the exact functions of the process? Experts roughly single out 7 main functions of marketing.
7 Main Functions Of Marketing Include:
- Overall management of your business offering whatever it may be (i.e a product or a service). This can be further broken down into different types;
- Budgeting. Everything to do with finance operations at any level of production and promotion;
- Promotion process that can also be further broken down into many different types and approaches;
- Distribution or product delivery to the client or a supply chain;
- Pricing of a product or a service;
- Information control. And under this is meant all kinds of information you need before, during and after product production;
- The final one is the selling process itself, which can be argued to include all the steps mentioned above. But it’s also fair to say it’s a separate step on its own.
Now let’s get into each of these in a little more detail.
Marketing Management
Marketing is a complex process that requires proper management to ensure precise and successful execution. It involves overseeing various aspects handled by different departments within the company. Effective management ensures everything runs smoothly, corrects any mistakes made by staff, and ultimately achieves the primary goal of selling a product or service. For boosting your social media presence, check out Mixx for buying Instagram followers and likes.
This could include managing the quality of the product or the service, getting in touch with the right people, reaching out to potential collaborators, then customers, analyzing the post production marketing campaign and how well it works.
Budgeting
One of the most important functions of marketing. Nothing can be done unless there’s enough money to support first the creation, then the distribution and promotion of a product or service. Given no business out there has an unlimited amount of source, budgeting is one of the most important steps within marketing. Selling is the most obvious finance operation. But the thing about marketing is that it involves finances outside of selling. For instance, funding new projects, getting a loan for the production, profit or loss control and similar financial operations that need clever management.
Promotion
Some would argue that marketing is in itself, a promotion process. And they wouldn’t be wrong. It’s just that marketing is much more than just that. However, without promotion nobody will even know you are selling something. Advertisements, collaborations, digital strategies, branding, there are hundreds of ways businesses can promote their offerings.
Promotion can include things like raising the awareness about the product through direct email marketing campaigns. Or increasing brand reputation through a collaborative work with a famous influencer on a specific social media platform.
Distribution
Once the product is completed, it needs to be delivered to either the customer or a supply chain. The latter can also be considered a customer in B2B by the way. In either case, it needs to ‘reach the shelves’, so to say.
The distribution process may be digital or physical, depending on the channel. Businesses should also take into consideration their main area of location and whether they want to distribute the product locally or globally. In short, time, money and location are the three main points in this process. But before any of that, the supply chain should fit the brand in more than one way.
Pricing
Pricing the product is more than just setting the price. The thing about prices is that they are never fixed. And since they fluctuate a lot, marketers need to constantly do market analysis in order to find the most optimal price at a particular period of time.It should align with the ones set by competitors. How you do this, depends on the type of product or a service you are selling.
For example, making an offering more affordable can be damaging to the brand value. Might seem unrealistic at first, but if we consider luxury items and their target market it will make sense.
Information Control
The process of marketing involves doing a whole lot of research and analysis. In fact, it’s based on analyzing data and using it to your benefit. This may include past information about the sellability of a product you want to launch, current situation on the market, competitive analysis. Relying on such information gives marketers valuable insight about the right direction they have to take the process to. They can even drive things like future predictions about how well the product will do.
Selling
Selling is the final goal of the marketing process. It’s just as complicated as marketing as a whole. This process includes things such as communicating with customers to better the personalization of the product in the future. Taking notice of the leads and the response you get from your target market.
Selling doesn’t mean literally putting the product on the shelf and leaving it to be. It involves a lot of communication from the moment the idea is born to the moment it’s launched and purchased by consumers.
Conclusion
Once again, marketing is an all-consuming process that covers pretty much every aspect of the business operation. The 7 functions of marketing discussed above can each be broken down into different types. There are hundreds and thousands of approaches, tactics and tips on how to execute each one of them. While businesses can adjust these seven steps to their niche, the end goal is to sell their product or a service. Meaning, for successful marketing, they can’t skip on one or the other.
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