Marketing and Marketing Types: Here is an Ultimate Guide for You!

So, what do you understand by marketing in simple terms? Marketing can be defined as the activity which business people do to sell something their products or services. It starts with a creator and ends with a consumer. Marketing is the process by which a customer learn about and acquire products and services. It is more than just advertising, but it is an integral part of it. Moreover, marketing involves the research that goes into the final decisions of how to pack and sell the product or service and the channels by which these can be offered. However, reading this definition you must be thinking how simple marketing can be, right? But, honestly this statement understates the complexity of marketing field. Marketing has changed its ways, it isn’t some old-fashioned approach now. It is much more than just making few cold calls and taking out the details of deals over sales meetings.

Over the period of time, the term marketing has evolved itself and grown in complexity with the evolution of technology. Technology has changed and transformed the ways that marketers use to use to reach to their potential consumers. Yes, by now you must have understood how much complex the marketing field is. Well, it doesn’t mean that you have to keep thinking of the fancy terminology to make perfect sense of it. For a business, who wants to establish itself and win the market share, it has to apply various marketing strategies to stay relevant. Nowadays, there are various types of marketing specializations and strategies to communicate the target market about the advantages and features of a product. Each marketing strategy has different ability to communicate an overall value to its customers.

You must have heard lots of people talking about the new forms of marketing which company can adopt to market its products or services. So, to ease the process for companies and business owners, we created this handy guide so that you can gain a true understanding of different types of marketing. Here is the list of marketing types:

Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing is focused on attracting customers and it is relatively new technique which works by being helpful and relevant to audience rather than interrupting them. However, most of the inbound marketing tactics come under digital marketing. This is because consumers are doing research online as they make progress through their own journey. The main goal of the inbound marketing is on creating valuable experiences which leaves the positive impact on people and business. Some of the inbound marketing tactics involve content marketing, email marketing, pay-per-click advertising (PPC), search engine optimization (SEO), and many more.

The focus is entirely put on to pull prospects and customers to website with relevant and helpful content. Once a customer is arrived, businesses can engage customers using different tools such as email and chat. The journey of the buyer is a key rule of inbound marketing along with the inbound marketing methodology. There are three stages in the buyer’s journey: 1. Awareness, 2. Consideration, and 3. Decision. These stages stand for the different phases through which a potential customer is in and how close are they to purchase the product or service.

Awareness is where people are visiting the website.
Consideration is when customers are searching for different solutions.
Lastly, the decision making stage is when buyers made an opinion about purchasing a product or not.

Again the methodology has following main actions: 1. Attract, 2. Convert, 3. Close, and 4. Delight. Following this methodology will ensure that you turn your marketing strategies into a repeatable process. Give it a try!

Outbound Marketing

First of all it is important to know what outbound marketing is. So, outbound marketing is something which can be referred to intrusive promotion like cold calling, TV ads, print ads, sending newsletters, billboards, and banner ads and email blasts. This type of marketing method is known as outbound marketing strategy, since a brand is pushing their message out to all consumers for spreading awareness. And, it doesn’t matter if they need it or not.

Outbound marketing is totally opposite of inbound marketing, because it focuses on promoting the product or service to people who aren’t even looking to buy anything. One of the amazing examples of outbound marketing is billboard advertising. You must have gone on a log drive or drive across the city, there you must have seen big boards sign advertising food or drink of some sort. And, think if that genuinely made you feel hungry or thirsty, regardless of the fact if you genuinely were.

You know why outbound marketing is done? It is actually important for the companies to let their potential customers know that they exist. This is the reason majority of companies today are doing different types of outbound marketing and it includes any marketing efforts which are taken to introduce a product or service in the market to people who isn’t looking for that product or service.

Service Marketing

Services, if defined in basic manner are known to be economic actions that are intangible and can satisfy different needs of a consumer. Few of the services provided are totally intangible in nature while others can be associated with the tangible goods. The production and delivery of the services goes hand by hand, this means you cannot store services and they have to used-up at the point when sale is done. Services can only be experienced and that why most business people rendering services asks for customer feedback. Some of the known examples of services include insurance, banking services, catering services, medical services, hair dressing services, etc. Always keep in mind that services are much more different from the products and to be successfully marketed they require various strategies.

Some of the unique features of service marketing include:

1. It is variable:

In service marketing no two experiences could be same. Even if the services are offered by the same service provider, the service experience for the customer would be different, some differences will be there. It is much more difficult to make a service standardize than to products. And, the quality of the service depends on the time and place it is delivered. For example, pest control services in Delhi would be different from pest control services provided in Mathura.

2. It is inseparable:

The services are totally non-separable from their suppliers. The services that a customer seeks need to be created, delivered and taken at the same time.

3. It is intangible:

Services rendered by the professionals are non-physical. This cannot be held, touched or tasted, they are intangible in nature. Services have no ownership and cannot be stored. However, the degree of intangibility does vary from service to service and provider to provider.

4. It has perishable nature:

A service tends to exist the minute it has been rendered. The experience of pest control ends for the customers the moment person is done with the job. And, the capacity of service can lost if not utilized in time.

Service Marketing is very different from what you do in the product marketing due to the non-availability of a tangible element. However, service marketing has the advantage of some physical appearances such as food in a bar or restaurant, ambiance of an airport or arrangement of furniture. All these represents the quality of the services. Service marketing is successful when people offering the services bestow to the mindset of the clients.

Digital Marketing

Digital marketing is one of the most used and effective types of marketing strategies, which is cost-effective in nature. Apart from being just cost-effective, there are various other advantages of digital marketing. Let’s dive in to know.

Here are the major advantages:

Businesses can engage directly with the targeted audience.
Effects of the marketing done by you can easily be measured and if strategy is effective or not can be seen immediately.
Reach to a wider customers on the internet than traditional marketing.

Digital marketing is something which can help a business to be successful in their aims.

Digital marketing is a vast field and it consists of different branches which Small Businesses could adopt. However, for a business to determine which branch works best for them, it is important for them to understand those branches if they can work for their enterprise. A large business owner can work with both traditional and digitalized way of marketing. Well, when it comes to the small business, the big decision to make is choice. With an aim to become like big businesses, a small business may first want to learn how to target their audience, build up followers, and get visibility as affordably as possible.

Cause Marketing

Cause marketing is something which offers a key relationship with a non-profit organization which can yield possibility to both the nonprofit organization and the company. There are many companies which look for alliances for positive publicity and brand awareness.

Cause marketing strategy creates something useful to discuss about the goodwill of a company among the audience. Yes, it is true that it may not get your phone ringing just like that, but it will build upon your relation with prospects, clients and the community slowly and steadily.

So, once you have the list of things ready to do cause marketing, and you’ve finalized your marketing activities, it’s time to bring them all together. For cause marketing it is crucial to create a marketing calendar, and this can be done by making use the online format or software program of that you like. This marketing calendar is crucial because it will help you incorporate your efforts and assign them factual, yet deadlines which are manageable. With this, you can move your cause marketing project forward and while keeping everyone involved accountable.

B2B and B2C Marketing

1. Business to Business Marketing (B2B)

Business-to-business marketing or B2B includes the sale of products or services of one company to another. The techniques of B2B marketing depends on the same basic principles of consumer marketing however, these techniques are executed in a different way. The customer marketing principles depends on the price, popularity, status, and other emotional triggers of a product, whereas B2B buyers solely make decisions on the basis of price and profit potential.

Nowadays, things have changed totally and tech-savvy B2B companies are continuously finding unique ways to make use of social media for their advantage. The marketing success of B2B doesn’t come from advertising a product over radio or television, but it comes from establishing a company in the industry, and making your product seem like an essential.

B2B marketers are getting in front of niche buyers by:

Building relationships with buyers
Setting up kiosks at industry tradeshows
Sending out email newsletters
Hosting informational webinars
Maintaining an active, interactive social media presence
Attending industry networking events

B2B marketers focus on these large categories of customers:

Institutions like hospitals and schools
Companies that use their products
Government agencies
Companies that resell the goods to consumers

1. Business to Consumer Marketing (B2C)

Business to Consumer marketing comes is all sizes, speeds, and needs.

It is opposite to Business to business marketing as it typically involves making large purchases to meet identified needs of businesses, while business to consumer marketing involves a customer who typically makes much smaller purchases to meet a “need”. B2C marketing takes much less time as it depends on the decision of one person. Yes, consumers can even expect some benefit from purchase, make sure that it don’t weigh the financial risks as heavily as business-to-business marketing do.

An effective B2C marketers understands and develop the campaigns which connects with the mindset of their consumer. This can be done through various channels such as:

Direct and Internet marketing
Storefronts
Advertising
Discount offers

Important elements of B2C marketing:

Knowing your audience
Building the brand loyalty
Taking action to give response to negative feedback
Owning the brand
Taking advantage of online user-generated content

What are B2C marketing considerations?

Short sales cycles—days or even minutes
Customer service is core
Brand is built by advertising and referrals
Social media opens up huge possibilities for customer service, advertising, and building customer loyalty

Social Media Marketing

One of the most popular and effective type of marketing under digital marketing is social media marketing. Social media networks caters to the professionals, and comprises a wide range of geographical areas where people are social and interact with each other frequently. With social media marketing you will be able to reach your target audience and interact with them.

Yes, it is one of the best kinds of strategies for marketing, but it doesn’t mean this is always easy. Below mentioned are some of the challenges you could face:

1. Competitiveness: Most of the companies, whether big or small use it.

2. Time consuming method: You have to spend a great amount of time every week in engaging with the customers, answering their queries and creating high quality of content regularly.

3. Learning curve: This process will teach you many things from mistakes like:

Misconstrued message.
CPC (cost per click) getting out of control.
Analyzing audience wrong.

Everything that has cons, do have pros such as:

Easy to use: It is much easy platform to utilize for business and its audience.
Low cost technique: It is much low in cost and won’t burn your pocket.
Easy to merge: You can make it combine with other forms of marketing.
Targeting: Social media targeting is outstanding as you can target demographic by any possible metrics.
Brand loyalty: It will increase your brand loyalty in no time if customers gets positive experience.

PPC

PPC is among the expensive kind of marketing strategies. Pay-per-click advertising is when you pay an amount every time one of your ads gets clicked. However, there is a reason for widespread usage of PPC advertising. PPC is easy to use and companies are able to increase the trust of owners of business with it.

Below mentioned are some of the facts to keep in mind for PPC:

Place ads in a strategic position
Let call to action entice user to click on ad
The prices for PPC depends on keywords chosen as well as the demand
And, prices can fluctuate minute by minute

Challenges of PPC

Not paying attention to sponsored Ads: People ignore sponsored listings. However, if looked as a regular listing, greater response business can receive.

Bidding: Competition among advertisers for the prime position for advertisement. It has become a rat race. Staying calm and paying attention to the numbers may be helpful.

Price for each click: You will be paying for each click and clicks run up fast. This means you will need a pretty heavy budget.

With PPC you need an extraordinary collection of compelling ads, keyword management, and rightly optimized landing pages.

Advantages of PPC

Get visible immediately: With PPC, you are able to get traffic that is targeted in less than 48 hours. And, PPC and SEO is best thing to combine together as they complement each other well.

Tracking of ads in real time: PPC provides first-class advertisement tracking features like elaborated levels of tracking to get clear picture of who the viewers are.

Retargeting of ads: This is among the most impressive types of marketing strategies and simply means re-showing ads to your previous website visitors.

Local as well as global reach: PPC offers a business to reach locally as well as globally.

Product marketing

So, what do you understand by the term product marketing? Product marketing in general form is the focus area which dedicated to bring a new product or service strategically to the market. However, most of the marketers take it for granted. But, the everyday products that we use or see on supermarket shelves likely to have hours and hours of strategic planning. The planning which is dedicated for their presentation, price, competitive positioning and much more.

Product marketing is a discipline that has set the strategy for guiding most of the marketing specializations. Product marketing can be dealt after answering these questions:

Is the product luxury?
If a bargain is needed?
What features of a product make it stand out?
Is there a need to educate people about what the product does?

After these questions are answered by product marketing specialists, plotting a course for individual marketing channels need to be executed. Now the work of a product marketer will depend on the company, as most of the work is based on research. To do a product marketing it is important to know a product. For this a product marketer needs to dive into the competitive landscape, this will allow him to understand the important variables which are related to competitors’ review, products, and synthesize consumer research information. When a product marketer has every information that he needs, then it can be used to execute an overall product marketing strategy.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

SEO or search engine optimization is a branch of digital marketing which ensures you get free and organic traffic to your website. SEO is method which is used to outrank thousands of the websites, and keeping the position of your website at the top of the search results. Here are some of the challenges faced by SEO techniques:

Long term strategy: Getting results in organic way or getting on the first page of search engines takes time and patience.
Not instant: SEO isn’t instant like paid ads are. With strategy like paid ads, once can instantly see increase in traffic.
Lot of competition: SEO has a lot of competition, but in different ways.

All these are some of the challenges. But there are advantages too.

Too much business: SEO can drive too much business for you.
Making you visible: SEO brings visibility to business, and this ultimately means more revenue generation.
Trust among customers: With SEO, you can build trust with potential customers. When you rank at the top of the search results page, customers are more likely to trust your business.
Traffic to website: If SEO done in right manner, it can certainly bring free traffic to your website.

Email Marketing

One of the other effective digital marketing strategies is email marketing which works far better than its traditional counterpart. Because, collecting email addresses is easier than collecting emailing addresses.

Email marketing challenges

Competition: Like many other strategies of digital marketing, email marketing also has tough competition, but it is because it works so well. Competition is inherent as most people get n number of marketing emails every day from various companies.

Sending constant emails: It has to be done on regular basis, which increases the chances of getting spammed.

Professionalism: It is bit challenging to make a professional appearance.

Easy to use: Yes, primary disadvantage we could say. As it is so easy to use, everyone is using it.

Damaged reputation of brand: Yes, this can happen to you if you aren’t careful with what you are sending to your customers.

Designing: Most of the internet traffic is received from a mobile phones so it is important to have design which is responsive in nature.

Impersonal: Due to the email marketing nature, it’s comparatively impersonal as compared to other types of marketing strategies.

Email marketing advantages

Targeting: Amazing targeting options are provided by email marketing and allowing to tailor different emails for different demographics.

Low cost: Send thousands of emails every month for only a couple hundred dollars.

Tracking: One can track emails to see which ones are received. Moreover, it is an easy method to see consequences of an email campaign.

No efforts needed: There are no efforts needed for sending emails, you can do it whenever you want with an active internet connection.

Time: It saves time by permitting you to reach maximum number of customers in one go.

Builds loyalty: Email marketing build your brand if done in right manner. All you have to do is to continuously direct visitors to your site through emails.

Direct Marketing

Direct marketing as the name suggests is a method of selling products and services directly to the customers. The organizations which are involved in direct marketing communicate directly with their target audiences with their own promotional techniques. Direct marketing helps the businesses to build relations with customers in better manner because they are able to connect to them directly. Direct marketing is all about building the brand loyalty in existing customers and prospecting new ones. It is superior to other forms of mass marketing as an organization can reach to the particular target markets easily with it.

Some of the features of Direct Marketing comprises:

The audience which is most befitting for the company’s products or services is targeted.
It can fix accountability as compared to other methods.
Higher efficiency as it is targeted directly to customers.
Flexibility to make choice of marketing methods.

Some of the channels of Direct Marketing comprises:

1. Direct Mail: Direct mail is an effective method of making sales if used properly. It is effective to target the customers based on education, profession, demographics, or buying patterns. Direct mailing is something which is used by all types of organizations.

2. Email Marketing:

We have already explained the concept above and this is used by the companies to communicate with their audience. Being one of the most popular because it is inexpensive to design, create and send an email to thousands of people at a time.

It includes the following:

To improve customer relationships and loyalty, emails are sent to existing or previous customers
To acquire new customers, emailing is done to a chosen target audience
Including advertisements of other companies in emails sent.

Tools used for Email Marketing:

Display Advertisements
Mobile Banner Advertisements
Mobile Marketing
Location Based Services (Lbs)
Telemarketing
Social Media Sites
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Multimedia Message Service (MMS)
Short Message Service (SMS)
Mobile Applications