Marketing Must Not Be a Dirty Word if You Want to Succeed

Marketing has been defined as the "process of teaching consumers why they should choose your product over competitors." But marketing is the study and management of relationships, in its purest form. It involves not only the creation of the product or service concept, identifying who would purchase it, the promotion of it, and then the moving of it through the selling channels, or what is referred to in marketing textbooks as the 4Ps: product, price, promotion and place. 

The purpose of marketing, whether it is on social media, on your website, in paid advertising, on promotional giveaway items like pens and coffee mugs, or anywhere, is to capture the attention of the target market and encourage those people's purchasing decision while providing them with an easy, low-risk way of taking action. 

To master the basics of digital marketing, you need brand identification and consistency (across all channels, including website, mobile apps, social networks, and e-mail), social media outreach that creates and encourages a conversation between you and your customers/clients, connect optimization (meaning you have to have original, value-adding content on your website and blog), sales leads and conversions (meaning your website needs to be geared towards capturing customer information) and you must be found and optimized for search engines. That's the high level summary. :) 

Marketing is not something to be switched on and off or done sporadically. To be successful with your business, you need to devote consistent time and energy to it and make it an integral part of what you do. Some business owners I know set aside 30 minutes or an hour per day to promote their business on social media, write their blog posts, interact with their customers. Others do something on a weekly basis. The frequency should be up to you and the kind of business you have. (We all know of businesses that we tire of quickly when they "market" way too often to us.) 

Marketing genus Seth Godin says, " Our job is to connect to people, to interact with them in a way that leaves them better than we found them, more able to get where they'd like to go." Think about that as you plan the message for your business. What do you want others to take away from what you have to offer? How can you help people be better and get them where they'd like to go? 
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