What is Marketing?
Most people don’t really understand the difference between marketing and advertising. By default, people assume that they’re one and the same, but the reality is that advertising is just one piece or one component of your marketing. For people to be effective at marketing, they first have to understand what truly encompasses marketing. Marketing can be thought of as a mixture of psychology and math. When you market effectively, what matters are the numbers. Specifically, the numbers that ring the cash register and put money in your pocket. Marketing should lead to money generation. Many people don’t think about the numbers when they think about marketing, but the numbers are vital.
Marketing Metrics
Historically, marketing has not had a very clear cut, large scale metrics. Sometimes the success of marketing has been measured within the marketing department, but it’s not really attached to outcomes. This is one of the biggest things that’s not working with marketing: the metrics. It’s really easy to develop a checklist approach to being a marketer. While there’s nothing wrong with having a checklist, you can’t equate checking something off your list as a success. You have to focus on the most important thing about marketing, which is the results. If you check 1,000 things off your list but don’t generate an increase in revenue or profitability, you’ve just wasted your time doing things that make you look busy but aren’t really driving sales or profits. In order to avoid this mistake, focus on the outcome as a metric of success.
Know, Like, and Trust
If you think of a traditional sales funnel, there are three elements that are absolutely required to move someone from out in the marketplace as consumers, to the point of getting them to make a purchase. The first element is that they have to know about you. If they don’t know about you, they can’t find you to make a transaction. The second element is that they have to like you. This means they have to like you, like your product or service and like what your company stands for. The third and final element is that the consumer has to trust you. If they don’t trust you, they’ll never believe that your product or service is going to do what you say it’s going to do, and therefore will never surrender their money in exchange for it. The problem that most often happens is that marketers will try to accomplish all three of these things with one ad, or one campaign. This method is not effective. Instead, marketing must be broken into individual pieces, with each piece working to do a different element in order to eventually attain all three.
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