- What is marketing?
- What are the various types of marketing?
- What is Marketing Mix?
- What are the 4 Ps of Marketing?
- Are the 4Ps the sames as Marketing Mix?
- How do you create a marketing strategy?
- Developing and Executing your marketing tactics
- Your Marketing Leader – The Chief Marketing Officer (CMO)
- Are you wondering how to get into marketing?
- CTA’S
- Marketing-Related Organizations
- Other important terms
- Marketing Automation Software
- What else?
- Our Weekly Marketing Tips
We are all marketing experts. We understand the types of marketing deeply and the marketing mix we should be leveraging. But do we?
We all know what the marketing team is doing wrong, how it can be improved if only people would listen.
Often, this is the consensus for all teams working outside of marketing, anyway.
The truth is, marketing is a complex science that plays an essential role in your revenue engine.
In this article, we’ll explore a bit about marketing and hope that you realize what it is and how it can play a genuinely strategic role in your overall business success by the end of the article.
What is marketing?
The dictionary defines marketing as the action or business of promoting and selling products or services, including market research and advertising.
What does that mean?
In practice, marketing focuses on building awareness of your solutions with the people who potentially need them.
Marketing continues to educate these potential buyers until they are ready to buy the solution from your company directly from your website, your sales force, or your partners.
Note: The American Marketing Association defines marketing as “Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.” See their website for more details.
What are the various types of marketing?
If you are not in marketing, you may not realize the sheer number of types of marketing there are. This list is not intended to be exhaustive but does demonstrate the depth of options under the marketing umbrella.
Ultimately, select the right practices to align with your marketing strategy, and focus on your goals versus the cool tactics you could leverage.
Account-Based Marketing
Account-Based Marketing (ABM )is a strategic marketing approach that focuses on target accounts rather than the random spray-and-pray method of other forms of outreach like email or social media-based marketing.
Please read our guide to ABM to learn more.
This video does a wonderful job of explaining account-based marketing further.
Advertising
What is advertising?
Advertising is a form of marketing communication designed to promote a specific solution.
Advertising takes many forms, including:
- Web-based ads – e.g., Google Ads
- Social media ads — LinkedIn and other social media platforms support advertising.
- Television commercials
- Radio commercials
- Magazines
- Newspaper
4 Tips for using advertising in B2B
When using advertising as part of your go-to-market motion, there are a few things to keep in mind.
- Targeting your target buyers on the platforms they use
- Use messaging that speaks to these prospects.
- Experiment and A/B test to find the right combination of messages and platforms.
- Track your results and double down on what’s working while stopping what is not working.
Watch for Click Fraud — It Can Drain Your Digital Marketing Budget
What is click fraud?
Click fraud is the act of clicking on your paid ads to drive up your cost — without getting sales in return.
How does click fraud happen?
Bots. A bot is a computer program with the one goal of clicking on your ads.
Click farms. Click farms are made up of people who simply click on your ads all day.
How do you prevent click fraud?
There are a few ways:
- Monitor your ad spend, and the ROI of it, against known baselines. Use Google Analytics.
- Use a click fraud prevention tool like ClickCease.
Affiliate Marketing
What is affiliate marketing?
Affiliate marketing is a type of marketing where you pay third parties (i.e., affiliates) for driving traffic or sales to your website.
Trust Enablement, for example, acts as an affiliate for several products that we believe in and use ourselves.
4 Tips for working with affiliates
- Ensure they understand the business challenges your solutions overcome.
- Help them build a solid understanding of your solutions.
- Provide them with marketing materials and messaging to ensure brand consistency.
- Ensure your teams qualify leads from affiliates.
Affiliate Marketing Platforms
Affiliate marketing can be challenging to set up for smaller marketing teams.
That’s why there are platforms like Partnerstack, Impact, ShareASale, and many others to put affiliates into reach for any business.
These platforms typically:
- Create custom affiliate links for each partner.
- Deliver content to affiliates to use in their efforts.
- Get real-time insights into the performance of affiliate partners.
Please read our guide to affiliate marketing.
Branding
What is branding?
Branding is a form of marketing that associates images, symbols, words, and phrases with your company or products.
Companies like Nike, for example, have slogans like “Just do it” that inspire you to think of their company and products.
4 Tips for B2B branding success
- Start early but slow and simple.
- Create a style guide to lock down your branding guidelines. Branding includes font type and sizes, colors, logos, etc.
- Ensure branding is consistent everywhere.
- Audit at least twice a year to determine compliance with brand guidelines and to consider updates as needed.
Watch this video from Big Think on “How Apple and Nike have branded your brain” – it’s fascinating!
Chat Marketing
What is chat marketing?
Chat marketing uses live chat software to communicate with visitors to your website.
While we refer to it as chat marketing, it can be used to market through questions and answers, generate leads, provide support to existing customers, and close sales.
In addition to the business value, consider giving your chatbot a personality to keep it fun and keep people coming back.
With most chat marketing tools, you can:
- Assign ownership of chat messaging to a team in your business.
- You can set the chatbot to capture lead information.
- You can set up auto-response messages to respond to common questions and comments, saving time.
- Depending on your tools, you may be able to automatically route conversations of various types to other applications where those teams continue (e.g., a support system for support tickets).
Content Marketing
What is content marketing?
Content marketing teams are responsible for developing a strategy that focuses on delivering content to support stated revenue goals. This content generally supports all facets of the go-to-market motion, but prioritization is usually on generating inbound leads.
Please read our guide to content marketing.
And, if you are looking for the best content marketing tools today, check out our ultimate guide of go-to-market tools.
Evaluate AI-based content writers to scale your efforts
Customer Marketing
What is customer marketing?
Customer Marketing focuses on existing customers, keeping them happy with current purchases to remain customers, and identifying opportunities to spend more money with the company.
Please read our guide to customer marketing.
Email Marketing
What is email marketing?
Email marketing is a type of marketing where you send marketing messages to people through email.
Emails may nurture or build awareness of your products with prospects or directly sell your offerings.
4 Tips for email
- Segment your email lists to ensure you are delivering relevant information to each subscriber.
- Personalize your communications to the degree possible, at least to the segment level.
- A/B test your email outreach.
- Make growing your email list a priority.
GIve a listen to this webinar with Ann Handley on leveling up your writing to improve your overall email marketing results (sponsored by GetResponse).
Event Marketing
What is event marketing?
Event marketing is a type of marketing where you create and manage events to build awareness and generate leads (i.e., prospective customers).
Events may be in-person, digital, or hybrid (i.e., a bit of both).
4 Tips for event marketing
- Lock in your goals for the event – number of leads?
- Identify the ideal buyer profiles who will be at the event.
- Think through how you will stand out and draw their attention.
- Start planning early – it always takes longer than you expect.
What is Experiential Marketing?
Experiential marketing brings customers into your brand, engaging with it in a dynamic manner that brings your brand to life.
Learn more about Experiential Marketing.
Field Marketing
What is field marketing?
Field marketing is a type of marketing where marketing team members visit customers and prospects directly.
These meetings may occur in your retail stores, in customers’ offices, or even in people’s houses, depending on what products are being marketed and solved.
Field marketing is partially marketing and partially a sales role.
4 Tips for success
- Thoroughly research the customer you will be meeting with – know their business better than they do.
- Dress for success – you are representing your business.
- Bring marketing materials to support your meetings.
- Be prepared to answer questions about your solutions.
Guerilla Marketing
What is guerilla marketing?
Guerrilla marketing is an approach in which a company uses unconventional marketing techniques to promote its products or services — this can include anything from street marketing, co-opting a competitor’s event, etc.
Some guerrilla marketing tactics are:
- Using public spaces for advertising
- Hiring people to wear branded clothing
- Use billboards in a competitor’s area, across from their headquarters, for example.
- Organizing an event in a public space
Remember:
- Don’t break any laws
- Be creative and unexpected
- Generate attention and interest
- Be cheap or free to execute
- Have a clear call to action
Inbound Marketing
What is inbound marketing?
Inbound marketing leverages content and search engine optimization to lead people to your website to indicate their interest in your products and solutions.
People often tie together search engines, content, and inbound marketing, as content marketing and search engine marketing are critical components in the success of inbound marketing.
4 Tips for inbound results
- Do your SEO keyword research.
- Produce valuable content on a regular basis for those keywords.
- Use marketing automation to bring leads in.
- Analyze results, improve, and repeat.
Influencer Marketing
What is influencer marketing?
Influencer marketing is a type of marketing where you identify, reach out to, and work with key individuals who have influence over your target market.
NFT Marketing
What is NFT marketing?
NFT marketing is a type of marketing where you use marketing technology to manage the distribution of marketing materials.
The two most common types of NFT marketing are virtual cards and vouchers.
4 Tips for NFTs
- Personalize the marketing materials.
- Include a clear call to action.
- Make it easy for customers to redeem the offer.
- Test, test, test.
Partner Marketing
What is partner marketing?
Partner marketing is a type of marketing where you work with other companies to promote each other’s products and services.
This type of marketing can be compelling as it can help you access new markets that you couldn’t reach independently.
4 Tips for partner marketing
- Identify the right partners – both complementary and competitive.
- Agree on goals and success is measured.
- Create a joint marketing plan.
- Measure, adjust, and iterate
Product Marketing
What is product marketing?
Product marketing is a type of marketing where you are responsible for creating and delivering marketing messages about your company’s products.
4 Tips for product marketing
- Understand your products why people buy them.
- Develop content and other assets for your customer-facing teams.
- Create a process for regularly chatting with customers and prospects.
- Keep your products front and center with every communication.
Consider reading our article on Product Marketing vs. Solutions Marketing.
Public Relations
What is public relations?
Public relations (PR) is a type of marketing where you manage relationships with journalists and analysts to influence what these influential people write and say about your business.
4 Tips for public relations
- Create your list of analysts and media you plan to target.
- Build relationships even when you have nothing to share.
- Help them do their jobs. Develop stories that speak to the topics they write about, using our solutions, company, and employees as examples to bring the story to life.
- Be alert. The news comes up at unexpected times and you may need to react.
Search Engine Optimization and Marketing (SEO and SEM)
What is SEO and SEM?
SEO and SEM are two types of marketing where you focus on improving your website’s visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs) to get more people to visit your site.
Search engine marketing is the paid form of SEO, while SEO is the unpaid form).
4 Tips for SEM and SEO
- Do your keyword research.
- Ensure your site looks great on mobile devices, tablets, and desktops. Mobile is critical for most readers now.
- Write amazing content for the keywords you are focused on.
- Measure results, update content, and repeat.
Social Media Marketing
What is social media marketing?
Social media marketing is a type of marketing that focuses on marketing your company and products through social media channels.
Channels may include Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and others.
Solutions Marketing
What is solutions marketing?
Solutions marketing is a type of marketing where you focus on identifying customer needs and then delivering a solution that meets their need.
Consider reading our article on Solutions Marketing vs Product Marketing.
What is Marketing Mix?
The marketing mix represents the combination of tactics and approaches (like those noted just before this) that you use to achieve your marketing objectives.
The marketing mix generally includes the 4 Ps of Marketing.
Wait.
What are the 4 Ps of Marketing?
The 4Ps of marketing, plus two others noted by SNHU, are:
- People – To whom are you selling?
- Product – What do your companies need?
- Price – How much will customers pay for your solution?
- Place – Where will you sell your product?
- Promotion – How will you market your solution?
- Performance – How effective are your marketing efforts?
Are the 4Ps the sames as Marketing Mix?
No.
Or, yes.
It depends on how you create your effective marketing strategy.
Marketing Mix includes the 4Ps (plus the two others we included). If you are only considering these items, than they are the same. Otherwise, no.
How do you create a marketing strategy?
While the details vary, the following general approach will work for most companies.
Begin by answering these questions.
- What are the business goals for your company?
- What problems does your company solve?
- Are you selling business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-consumer (B2C) solutions?
- What is your ideal customer profile (ICP)?
- Where do your buyers find information today?
- What is your current marketing budget?
- What marketing technology do you already own?
- Is your team responsible for generating leads? Sales? Brand creation and awareness?
Based on these questions, you can flesh out a strategy to achieve your goals.
Also, consider this 7 step marketing strategy framework from Mark Evans as you think through your own strategy.
Developing and Executing your marketing tactics
You have your strategy.
Do you your marketing mix decided?
Now, how are you going to achieve it?
Start by reviewing your goals and budget
What are your goals and budget?
Do you have to generate 10,000 leads in the next quarter?
Are you trying to close one new enterprise customer?
Are you looking to bring a steady stream of clients into your supermarket?
Determine the best marketing techniques to use
Based upon the goals, existing budget, and access to leads, determine the right tactics to use.
For example, if you have an email list of 200,000 subscribers and need to bring in 100 leads next quarter, you may be able to achieve that goal with a couple of email marketing campaigns.
But, if you have 1000 email subscribers, very little social media presence, and need to bring in 2000 leads, you may need to see if there are any significant events next quarter with your ICP in attendance.
Or, if you need to close one or two target customers and are using ABM technology, you may be able to identify who is currently “in-market” and create a personalized ABM campaign for these targets and reach your goals this way.
Communicate your plans
Everyone involved with go-to-market activities should know what marketing campaigns are planned or currently underway.
Your sales teams, customer success, support, and services teams will likely have feedback on prospective upsell or cross-sell targets, key people to include in your outreach, and be able to activate critical customers to act as references for your efforts.
Your Marketing Leader – The Chief Marketing Officer (CMO)
The Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) is responsible for all marketing activities.
This includes developing and executing the marketing strategy, the marketing mix, working with sales and services to identify leads and support activations, managing budgets, and ensuring marketing technology is integrated correctly into overall operations.
Chief Marketing Officer Responsibilities
Your CMO should a deep understanding of marketing technology, go-to-market approaches for similar businesses and industries, the ability to develop and execute marketing strategies, and the ability to work with other teams within the company to achieve common goals.
In addition, your CMO leads the entire organization, which typically consists of teams such as:
- Creative Services – Graphic design, video, web development, and copywriting
- Demand Generation – Lead generation campaigns, marketing automation, and social media marketing
- Marketing Operations – Database marketing and management, campaign execution, and measurement
- Public Relations – Media relations, analyst relations, content marketing
How Much Does a Chief Marketing Officer Make?
In the U.S., according to Glassdoor the range for the average salary of a Chief Marketing Officer is just above $200,000 per year.
Of course, the average CMO salary varies across the globe. As the time of this writing, per Glassdoor, here are the average base salaries for several locations across the globe.
Salaries across the United States
-
CMO salary San Francisco: $202,903 per year.
- CMO salary NYC: $204,248 per year.
- CMO salary Charlotte: $205,027 per year.
- CMO salary St Louis MO: $203,623 per year.
- CMO salary Boston: $198,509 per year.
Salaries across the globe
- Canada: CA$218,490 per year.
- United Kingdom: £173,645 per year.
- India: ₹3M per year.
- Australia: A$202,500 per year.
Are you wondering how to get into marketing?
Still in school?
If you are still in school, work with your college or university to identify companies providing marketing internships.
Ideally, an internship would take the student through various marketing roles, giving them experience and broad understanding and providing the company with an extra set of hands.
No longer in school?
If you are not still in school, consider the following:
- Consider what type of marketing role most interests you.
- Talk to anyone in your network in that role to learn more. Buy them coffee, either in-person or virtually, and pick their brains.
- Think through and document which of your current skills are transferrable to that marketing position.
- Be prepared to answer common marketing interview questions as well as questions like:
- Why do you want to go into marketing?
- Why do you find this type of marketing appealing?
- Why do you want to change careers?
- What skills and experiences from your previous roles are transferrable to this job?
CTA’S
What are CTAs in marketing?
A CTA is an acronym for call-to-action, an covers any prompt that encourages a prospect to take some kind of action.
Various types of CTAs include:
- Asking customers to follow you on social media
- Signing up for a newsletter
- Downloading an e-book or white paper
- Attending a webinar
- Registering for a contest or promotion.
4 tips for effective call-to-actions
- Test and retest. A/B testing of your CTAs will show you what resonates with your audience.
- Ensure the CTA is clear — don’t tap-dance around it, what do you want from the reader?
- Make the CTA easy to find and placed in several spots if possible.
- Relevant to the value you create in the rest of the marketing piece containing the CTA
Marketing-Related Organizations
Product Marketing Alliance (PMA)
The PMA is a membership organization consisting of marketing professionals from various industries. The PMA provides its members with access to marketing resources, educational events, and networking opportunities.
Other important terms
What is a Buyer Persona?
A buyer persona is a fictional representation of your typical customer.
Buyer personas can be based on industry, business needs, demographics (age, gender, occupation), psychographics (values, interests), etc..
Here is an example buyer persona created in Lucid.
Disclosure: We are reader-supported. If you click on a link and make a purchase we may make a small commission at no extra cost to you. Learn more.
Note: We created this with Lucidchart and we are happy to share the project with you directly, just reach out to us and we will share the project with you if that is of value.
What is lead nurturing?
Lead nurturing is the process of keeping leads aware of your solutions and keeping you top-of-mind.
What is marketing automation?
Marketing automation is the use of software to automate marketing tasks.
What is the answer? Marketing is a process which aims at : (A) Production (B) Profit-making. (C) The satisfaction of customer needs (D) Selling products
Answer: (C) The satisfaction of customer needs
Marketing is a process which aims at Satisfaction of customer needs.
Marketing Automation Software
We are evaluating the best marketing automation software on the market.
What tools, and what categories, would you like to see us evaluate?
What else?
We have covered strategy, marketing mix, the CMO, various types of marketing, and much more.
And we know there is much more to cover.
Stay tuned – More updates to our guide are on the way.