So what is marketing actually?
Marketing is where your business and your customers cross over, meet, and interact.
One definition of marketing is:
The delivery of a product or service to a customer, at a profit.
So, to ‘do’ marketing, you need to offer a product or service.
And you need to make a profit.
Or it’s not really marketing.
Marketing is what you do to sell something and make money.
Marketing is about how you persuade or encourage people to buy from you.
Marketing is how you get more customers to your business.
Marketing is manipulation. It’s using your knowledge, experience, and ideas to ‘manipulate’ your audience to buy from you.
Now manipulation is a word that understandably has negative connotations, but there’s a difference between manipulating someone into doing something they don’t want to do or manipulating something so that it fits perfectly into the space that’s available for it.
Marketing manipulates people to buy something they need or want and you use it to get them to buy it from you rather than someone else.
And yes, sometimes you have to manipulate them to realise that they need or want what you sell.
Over 30 plus years of training thousands of individuals across a huge range of markets and sectors, my own definition of Marketing is:
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Developing and Managing a product (or service)
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Presenting it to your audience
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So that they take action
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So that somebody benefits
Let’s go through that.
Developing and managing a product. So many people set themselves up to sell what they can do rather than what the audience – the customers – want. Marketing is working on your product or service so that it is suitable for the marketplace and then.
..
Presenting it to your audience – by determining who your audience is and telling them your product exists, in such a way to make them…
Take action – usually they buy your product, or get involved, or join your group…
So that someone benefits. For example, through profit, engagment, or support, someone has to benefit.
Developing and managing a product, presenting it to your audience, so that they take action, so that someone benefits.
Marketing is how you expand your market from dealing with people you know to people you don’t.