Understanding Basic Marketing For New Business Owners

Mention the word “marketing,” and a whole host of images and thoughts come to mind. The term is used more and more these days interchangeably with other functions that relate to a business’s public relations, brand, and communication goals. While it’s not entirely inaccurate to do this, it can confuse newer business owners, trying to navigate their way through this exciting, thrilling, and constantly evolving journey of the modern-day entrepreneur. So let’s break down bits of information that you can use to determine what level of marketing services or functions your business might need, no matter where you’re at on the business scale.

“Advertising is what you pay for; publicity is what you pray for.” – Helen Woodward.

One of our most favorite quotes ever. Spoken by Helen Woodward in 1938, the first female advertising executive in the United States was right then, and she’s even more so now. With ongoing advances in technology, our businesses’ opportunities to market and grow are limited only by our imaginations. (and our budgets).

But, in a world gone crazy for the “next best thing,” how do you use your marketing function to create that all-important sense of longevity for your business? How do a solid marketing manager and team retain business as well as grow an existing customer base? Before we can understand the answers to those two questions (which could become unbelievably complex, by the way), we’re going to break down the discussion into five points of interest.

1. Online marketing
2. Traditional marketing
3. “Purpose-driven” marketing
4. Ongoing marketing
5. Marketing management

It seems crazy, but each of these ideas speaks to very different parts of the “marketing” function overall. Knowing what they mean and how they interact with each other will guide you toward informed decisions in as much as your overall marketing function is concerned.

In layman’s terms, each of the ideas mentioned above serves specific goals in and of themselves. However, they cannot exist alone and need to have a certain level of integration with each other to determine the overall behavior of your marketing goals and your business as a whole.

Online marketing refers to all of the practice of leveraging all of your companies web-based channels to create awareness about your brand and products or services to all of your potential customers. To give you an idea of what this looks like, look at WEBX360, a company specializing in doing that. Purpose-driven marketing refers to managing campaigns and events that run for a specific time and a specific purpose. 

You might be growing your product line, or you’ve expanded and wanted your customers to know about your new capacity levels; this function managed by your marketing manager will run independently of your ongoing marketing, and its success can be organized and weighted.

Remember, you want to customize your products and services as much as possible, and your marketing teams retain an integral role in managing how that happens.

Now bringing all of these functions together is your marketing manager. They serve a particular role in your business. Together with the sales, communications, and product development teams (and all of these teams could be just you, by the way), they are responsible for the comprehensive management of all the moving parts in your marketing department.