The Integral Areas of Marketing

Leafing through the knowledge I could acquire over time, I think marketing is a very vast subject expanding to different dimensions. Generally, there is a misconception about marketing where people think it’s just about social media but that’s not true. Marketing strategy is a massive undertaking, and it’s difficult to know where to start, and that’s why most of the strategies often fail. There are different frameworks out there that we could use to understand what marketing strategies would be right for the company and how can we adopt it. Frameworks like SWOT Analysis, OGSM and RACI charts are some of the examples. We’re not discussing the frameworks here. The main cycle of an execution process looks like this:

Research →Strategy →Execution

Marketing includes all the activities necessary to generate sales. In a for-profit company, the goal is to live out its mission and for that, it’s crucial to generate revenue as well.

So, to adopt a strategy, the first thing to understand is what kind of research do we need. How to do the actual research? How to align with stakeholders and why we’ll be working with them?

To know about this, let’s first dive into the common misconceptions about marketing

• The goal of marketing is to trick customers
• Marketing is all about advertising
• Marketing is a soft skill
• Marketing is dead over time
• Marketing is just managing the website and the Twitter account

More misconceptions can be added to the list and as there’s always a yin in yang, there is some bad marketing out there as well. To get your marketing methods right, start with focusing on awareness, interest, consideration, intent, evaluation and finally the purchase. This is one of the best methods to understand where to start and what to focus and how to know whether we’re doing the right thing.

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There are 8 core areas of marketing and they are:

• Product Marketing
• Brand Marketing
• Demand Generation
• Events and Community
• Public Relations
• Content and Creative
• Operations and Analytics

Brief descriptions:

Product Marketing

Firstly, the role of a Product Marketer is to act as a glue between marketing and product teams. Let’s start right there. Being really close to the customers and understanding what they want in terms of product features, etc are some of the key responsibilities of a product marketer. Product Marketing sits at the intersection of Marketing, sales, engineering and product. How are you going to win the market is the ultimate goal here. PM generally tends to focus more on pre-sale value creation. The 6 key responsibilities in product Marketing are:

• Conduct user research
• Identify market opportunities
• Product packaging, pricing and messaging
• Product launches
• Between marketing, sales, product and engineering
• Maintain competitive analysis

Brand Marketing

The realistic goal of brand marketing for a company is to understand how does the company want to be perceived by the market. It’s a way of knowing how our brand is making an impact in the market. It’s said that Brand Marketing is the voice and tone for the company and it helps in positioning the company in the current market. It’s the Brand Marketing that creates awareness among the people about the brand and the brand name is the bridge between the product and the customers. This mode of marketing allows a brand to be emotionally connected to the audience, be consistent, flexible and define their purpose.

Demand Generation

Demand generation is another word for Lead generation, growth marketing and digital marketing. Generating leads for the brand and nurturing them to sales is the ultimate goal here. This method of marketing is responsible for 4 major things and they are :

• Creating a pipeline of leads for sales
• Optimize lead funnels
• Experiment with channels
• Nurture leads

Events and Community

This is one of the coolest methods of marketing. You can get in touch with your leads and have fun at the same time. It’s a way of connecting prospects, customers and others in the industry, both online and offline. This is where you build a movement that supports the companies strategy and also one of the important and efficient ways to nurture influencers and power users. Community events are the right time to enhance and build your network and a place where you can share your thoughts and ideas.

Sales Enablement

Sales enablement is typically found in an enterprise company with a larger sales team or a longer sales cycle. Marketing and sales should be aligned equally for success either way. The key responsibilities of this method of marketing are:

• Create collateral for the sales team like presentations and email templates
• Educate sales about market opportunities
• Train sales about product releases and marketing campaigns
• Write case studies

Public Relations

PR is generally outsourced to a dedicated PR firm. The key responsibilities here are understanding where the customers consume information from and secure coverage in relevant media. At its core, PR is one of the most efficient fields of marketing where you nurture the media and analyst relationships. Researching, conducting, evaluating and maintaining a calendar of newsworthy content is some of the functions with PR. It also encompasses anticipating, analyzing and interpreting public opinions.

Content and Creative

It’s heard that people say “Content is the King” and yes, that’s right for an efficient marketing campaign or strategy. This field is where people also bring ideas from other marketing areas like:

• Demand generation campaigns
• Polished sales enablement collateral
• Promotional content
• PR media kit
• Thought leadership pieces
• Brand materials

Operations and Analytics

The concluding area of marketing focuses on managing the software tools for successful marketing activities such as marketing automation platform. Tracking key performance indicators and optimizing the workflows is inevitable when it comes to an efficient marketing strategy. The key objective here is to ensure data heath and conduct an in-depth analysis of campaign elements.

The above listed are 8 core areas that ensure marketing has to be done right. As we speak, marketing is a wide range of ideologies and methods that trigger the success of a product and creating the best plan for a product reach and ROI becomes the responsibility of a good marketing process.

Thank you for reading!

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