What is Marketing and What is the Purpose of Marketing?

The act of drawing people’s attention towards a product or service to convert them into customers in the future is called marketing.

Experts call it a set of processes comprising of advertising, promotional activities, sales, and distribution that help the brands stay with the customers right from the identification of target audience to after-sales.

With the help of these processes, the brands sort of declare that, ‘they have arrived,’ the audience, competitors, and other market contingents.

The conveying of messages regarding arrival at places where you are most likely to get noticed also sums up the process.

This act of attracting the audience does not involve sending promotional messages through offline and online medium only.

The process is more profound and more extensive. The promotional messages and materials constitute the content for the propagation of ideas.

However, the process starts way before than preparing the promotional content. It begins with the identification of the target consumer profile.

Identification of customer profile

Marketers work in close coordination with the product developers. They do the job of drawing the marketers’ attention to the product features in the manner the latter are built. Thus, the very first step includes customer profiling, that comprises:

• Demo-graphical analysis of the target customers – age, income, needs, interests, lifestyle, etc.
• Identifying gaps in need fulfillment
• Placing the brand against competitors’ shortcomings
• Understanding customer needs and preferences

According to the identification done, the promotional messages and related campaigning features are designed.

Designing of the promotional campaign

Online has become a powerful medium for reaching prospective customers. The marketers have to cover all touch points so that a consistent message corresponding to the brand’s image reaches the audience. Therefore, the campaign includes:

• Offline advertising: Billboard, TV, print medium, etc.
• Online promotion: Blogs, social media app development
• Web development
• Email marketing campaign, SMS marketing

By doing all these activities, marketers try to achieve multiple objectives. Let’s take a look at the key purposes of marketing.

Objectives of marketing

There have to be some solid reason businesses invest sizably to reach the customers and propagate the promotional message. The main objectives are:

#1. Engaging the target audience

The success of any brand in a highly connected world of the present times depend significantly on networking.

Every user of a social media network or network of any other kind works as an effective, propagating medium and further engages people with similar interests.

Apart from leveraging the ripple effect of networks, the other ways of engaging the target audience are:

• Monitoring the responses through blog’s or social media posts’ comments
• Commenting on other blogs prepared by your niche’s thought leaders
• Retweet or re-share the user-generated content or influencers’ content

Engaging the target audience serves better when you have chosen an online medium as a means to communicate.

The fastest reactions in the form of comments make it easier for the businesses to solve the problems before their growing out of proportion.

The end-users feel someone reliable is around when they find the business’s name whenever they visit any online platform. Some of the result-oriented ways of engaging the audience are:

• Asking the users to reconsider the purchase through re-targeting,
• Reminding them of the frequent purchases made and
• Telling about new arrivals through opt-in engagements

These methods help drive customer loyalty towards the brand as a lot of their time gone in searching is saved.

The ready-made solutions leading to ‘click and buy’ kinds of experiences offer the ease that sets you apart from the competitors and to become their first choice.

#2. Prove subject or industry expertise

Suppose you are an expert in mobile app development. By writing blogs, white papers, and preparing case studies, you can establish yourself as an expert.

The readers feel they are in safe hands when your knowledge sorts some of their issues or provides solutions.

Also, writing fact-filled content tells how closely you monitor the market. Some of the ways you can establish the thought leadership are:

• Organizing webinars and online interactive sessions
• Preparing YouTube and Instagram posts demonstrating innovative methods
• Preparing explainer videos
• Taking part in discussion forums
• Commenting in the blogs and writing replies while adding links to informative content

The ruling king here will again be the content. Since online media has become the primary search tool, to portray the thought leadership, you have to work on the online presence and manage brand reputation.

While brand reputation management helps in serving the dual purpose of building a positive image and negating the damaging effect of criticism received, the active participation in blogging and other activities offer better quality consumable to the end-users.

Online brand reputation building as that of a market leader or thought leader makes it easier for the users to connect with the brand positively.

The marketers can create a web presence that engages the audience and compels them to sign on the dotted lines without any doubt in mind.

Moreover, the response management feature available, while establishing thought leadership online, offers the businesses the instant food to grow and develop their products/services as per the customer expectations.

Besides, the use of analytics allows marketers to decide upon the type and timing of content to create the best impact.

#3. Drive traffic and boosting numbers eventually

Initially, the marketers focused only on blowing the trumpet and making people aware. With the emergence of technologically advanced tools like machine learning and data science, marketers have to outsmart themselves and do much more than generating traffic.

Now, the focus is to convert the incoming traffic into prospective customers first and then into loyal customers with changing times.

Some of the proven ways of using marketing to drive traffic and more sales are:

• Use of UI/UX in custom software development: Since marketing in present times is more about engagement, the UI/UX can help make the solutions as user-friendly as possible. The data-driven designs engage the customers, help them feel comfortable with the interfaces, and make buying decisions in favor of the brands.
• Product description optimization: When any user searches anything over the web, the products marketed by experts appear the foremost and on the top of the results when the optimization is done.
• E-commerce feature inclusion: Custom software designing is not limited to apps and websites. The marketers get the support of e-commerce-driven solutions which they enhance further with advanced solutions like:
• 3D models of the products
• Explainer video for learning usage
• Carts styles that support the fast purchase
• Multiple payment gateways to allow the secure purchase
• Fastest delivery guarantee

All these features help in converting interested customers into regular and loyal ones.

Collecting responses through surveys, product feedback, and ratings of the products further improve the promotion efforts.

Also, the interactive posts help the marketers achieve organic traffic that can later convert into repeat visits and orders.

Saving the last order information and reminding the same and telling about the similar products with better deals are the proven actionable that register higher numbers and better margins.

#4. Building brand awareness – the start and the ultimate ending

All the marketers’ activities mentioned above ultimately result in building better brand awareness.

Before the sales, the customers are fed with positioning techniques to assure them that they will buy the right product.

After the purchase, too, the after-sales services, easy returns policies, installation services, etc. help ascertain the righteousness of buying decisions that customers have made.

The other purposes solved by building brand awareness are:

• Telling the audience who you are
• Finding keywords that help customers reach you
• Being there on the platforms where the customers are
• Communication of unique propositions – best rates, better adaptability, easy usage, faster solution, etc.
• Values created by the brand – green products purchase, giving back to society with sales portions pledged to donations, smart functioning yielding better user experience, problem-solving support, etc.
• Various touchpoints for customers to reach – Through press releases, YouTube outros, and social media pages, the brands can melt the gap between offline and online, and tell the customers about the accessibility.

Apart from concentrating on the positives, the brand awareness building requires being a bit self-critical too.

The marketers must convey accurately through feedback analysis, etc. how and where the brands need improvement.

Some tools for building brand awareness are:

• Press releases
• TV and print advertising
• Social media management
• Blog management
• YouTube and Instagram channels/pages
• Feature adoption software, and others

Brand awareness is a very serious issue to tackle. The marketers cannot falter on this aspect at any cost.

The whole purpose can get defeated if the users cannot connect to the brand the way it intends.

Thus, no wonder the brands do not mind assigning a significant budget to promotions and advertising.

Without these, the brands’ presence goes unnoticed; such is the level of importance attached to brand positioning!

Conclusion

To conclude, when any brand is fully aware of the people’s expectations and behaves accordingly; it is not a matter of fluke, but the result of a planned brand positioning expertise working behind it.

So, know what marketing and its various objectives are, this will help you become the brand you strive to become.

About the Author!

Tarun Nagar is the Founder & CEO of Dev Technosys mobile app development company USA. With 10+ years of experience of enabling then Start-ups which are now global leaders with creative solutions, he is differentiated by out-of-the-box IT solutions throughout the domain. He is known for his visionary qualities and adaptability for technology and trends, passionate as he is in every aspect dedicated to making IT simple, accessible and approachable for business enterprises.