Making a great product is never enough—you need to preach it everywhere. How would you know about the Apple if they hadn’t spread the word in the market? Even the service providers or freelancers cannot excel a single bit if they don’t tell people why they are so good. In simple words, you need to market anything you want to sell.
The question is, how do you market your services or products? Marketing consists of several activities which collectively help you achieve your marketing goals. Today, the Marketing Tutor has explained these marketing activities.
Table of Contents
What are Marketing Activities
If marketing activities are defined in simple words, here is how we would do it.
Marketing activities are all targeted actions, plans, and strategies that help businesses attract customers and sell their products or services.
Marketing activities include everything from understanding your customers’ needs and facilitating them even after the sales.
For instance, doing market research is a marketing activity at an initial level. Apart from that, marketing campaigns, advertising, and brand development are all marketing activities.
Marketing activities are conducted to achieve various goals, but here are some of the most important objectives of any business.
- Brand building or branding
- Selling products or services
- Achieving customer satisfaction
- Business growth
- Achieving organizational/business goals
Let’s discuss some of the most common types of marketing activities.
Types of Marketing Activities
Marketing Activity No. 1. Know Your Customer
Knowing your customer is basically the need identification process and other important things about your customer.
For example, who are your potential customers? What do they do? What is their buying power? Can they afford your product or service? How often can they repeat purchases? Why do they need your product? Where do they prefer buying it? What urges them to buy this particular product? What are they expecting from you?
Marketing Activity No. 2. Do Your Market Research
Knowing your customer is technically a part of market research. Once a business identifies its target audience or potential customers, it is time to dig deeper—thorough market research.
Typical market research would include knowing your customers’ age, gender, status, income, etc. The market research also includes identifying the marketing channels that are suitable for your customers or where you can easily reach them.
Skipping this process is a grave mistake, and many businesses commit this blunder. Some products like bread, detergents, soaps, etc., don’t need extensive market research because these products are used by almost every individual. In this case, the only thing you have to do is differentiate your product.
Marketing research has two major benefits;
- It reduces the risk of failure.
- Product testing can help you understand the initial customer behavior about your product.
Marketing Activity No. 3. Conduct Market Segmentation
Customer segmentation is a must-do marketing activity. Customer segmentation is a process in which you divide or categorize a broad group of customers into smaller categories. For example, Pepsi sells different types of soft drinks, including Dew, Pepsi Cola, Mirinda, Diet Pepsi, and 7up.
Now, these products fall into the category of soft drinks, but all of them have a different customer base. Pepsi diet is preferred by people who want less or no sugar in their drink, mostly diabetic patients. Similarly, Dew has a different customer base.
Marketing Activity No. 4. Brand Development
Brand development or branding must be a mandatory part of marketing. Your brand logo, slogan, motto, and brand identity must be a solid portrayer of your business values. It is your brand that will help you stand out in a cluster of competitors.
For instance, Coca-Cola’s logo is enough for people to identify the company’s products even if there isn’t anything written on the product.
Therefore, it is very crucial to start building a brand from the initial days of your business.
Marketing Activity No. 5. Improve Customer Experience
Even if you are selling great products or services, it is important for your brand to improve customer experience. Focusing on customer experience reduces churn rate and helps businesses boost their revenue. It is obvious that retaining a customer is easier and cheaper than creating a new customer.
It is also essential to understand that customer experience and customer relationships are different things. Customer relationship means how well you communicate with your customer, while customer experience helps build an emotional attachment with your customer.
Here is how you can improve the customer experience
- Build an emotional relationship with them
- Get regular feedback and suggestions
- Get feedback from your employees
- Remember your customers on their special days
- Offer special discounts to your regular customers.
Marketing Activity No. 6. Product Distribution Channels
Product distribution channels are the modes or routes through which the product is made available to the end consumer. The distribution chain may consist of multiple links, including wholesalers, retailers, eCommerce stores, warehouses, etc.
In some cases, customers directly buy from the manufacturers; it is common in the B2B market. Similarly, many brands have their own outlets or franchises, and products are directly sent to these selling points. Some brands may prefer selling through wholesalers and retailers.
The right distribution channel depends on what you sell and where your customers want your products.
However, it is very important to understand that every link in your distribution channel will affect the price of the product.
Marketing Activity No. 7. Selecting and Pricing a Product & Service
You may be amazed to know that there are more products in the market than the buyers. In other words, the market is already saturated, and your business needs to stand out if you want to survive, let alone grow.
Therefore, choosing the right product or service can help you generate sales and retain customers. The right product means a problem-solving solution; something that adds value to your customers’ life. Otherwise, you will be easily forgotten.
The other important thing to do is to price your product or service in the right way. It would help if you considered the following things.
- What are the prices of your competitors?
- How will the distribution channels affect the product price?
- Can your customers easily pay this price?
Furthermore, customer demand, product availability, etc., are vital factors that affect product pricing.
Marketing Activity No. 8. Promotional Activities
Promotional activities are the actions a marketing team performs to educate, persuade, or inform the customers about the products or services offered by the brand. For a business, it is vital to evaluate the promotional activities very closely to get desired results. Here is what promotional activities can do for your business;
- Provides accurate information about the product or services
- Boosts brand awareness
- Generates more leads and traffic
- Create an emotional attachment between the brand and the customers.
Marketing Activity No. 9. Networking
Networking is one of the most important marketing activities for modern-day businesses. There is a saying, “your network is your net worth.”
Networking helps you connect with professionals, public figures, and VIPs, and their association with your business can boost your brand awareness regime. Networking also helps you generate more leads.
However, networking in the right manner is equally important. For instance, if you are selling business software, you may want to connect with websites like Capterra, G2, SoftwareAdvice, etc., because the customers highly visit these websites for product reviews and general information about business software.
Marketing Activity No. 10. Direct Marketing
Direct marketing targets customers individually; it is a more personalized or customized form of marketing. If you do it right, the good thing about direct marketing is that it is more cost-effective and yields better results.
Common examples of direct marketing include direct mails, customized emails, telephone marketing, text messages, etc.
Benefits of Marketing Activities
From our discussion above, it is obvious why marketing activities are so important for any business. Still, we have rounded up some of the most prominent benefits of marketing activities.
Better market understanding
Thorough market research (a marketing activity) helps you understand your product’s market in a better way. You can determine the opportunities and threats you may face in the market. Moreover, you will be able to determine the true potential, strengths, and drawbacks of your products or services. All of this will ultimately help you strengthen your relationship with your customers.
Better customer understanding
One of the most significant advantages of marketing activities is that you can understand your customers better. Knowing their preferences, likenesses, purchasing power, taste, and expectations helps you develop better and more personalized products. This leads to stronger relationships with customers and attracts more leads.
Better business branding
Marketing activities are very effective in turning your business into a brand. As mentioned earlier, branding is important for differentiation from your competitors. Unique designs, slogans, name, specific colors, and logos, when combined with value-added products, produces excellent results. It is no secret that people nowadays usually buy brands rather than products.
Better business promotion
Brand promotion is also a vital marketing activity. Promotional activities not only help extend your market reach, but they are a great tool to win the trust and loyalty of your customers. Customer feedback, special or personalized discounts, and notifications about the latest offers can make them feel special.
Help scale business
It is not difficult to understand that all the above-mentioned marketing activities eventually help you scale your business. Starting a business is difficult but growing or expanding it is the real challenge, especially in today’s world.
If you are not consistent in marketing activities, your customers will start looking for other options, and this would mean the death of your business.
That was today’s discussion on marketing activities. Please let us know if we missed any marketing activity.
