What is Marketing?

Marketing might be one of the most misunderstood subjects in the business world today.

Marketing is defined on Google as “the action or business of promoting and selling products or services, including market research and advertising”.

The definition of a word should give a person a full conceptual understanding of that word. If a meaning of a word does not give the full conception of a word, you will find people unable to properly accomplish the word itself.

If we break down the above definition given by Google word for word, it does not give the correct concept of what marketing is.

Based on Google’s definition all you need to do is promote a product or service to get sales. It should have some market research and advertising.

Sounds incredibly simple. Every business should be booming based on the above definition since every business does exactly what Google states.

Unfortunately this is not the case. In the first year 20% of small businesses fail. By the second year that number has risen to 30% and by year 5 that number has increased to 50%.

In an article written by Inc.com called “The Top 5 Reasons Small Businesses Fail” the #1 reason is “Failure to market online”.

These two datums don’t make sense. Google says all you have to do is promote your product or service online to get sales, but the #1 reason small businesses fail is “Failure to market online”.

How is this possible? In the year 2021 small businesses know that they need to market online and generally do, but still we have failing businesses.

What if what was being done by most small businesses as “marketing” wasn’t really marketing. What if the woefully inadequate definition of “marketing” by Google directs people down a path that only gives 1 aspect of what marketing is, but not everything else that is needed for marketing.

Could that possibly answer the question as to why small businesses doing “marketing” are failing? It isn’t by any means the only answer, but it definitely is a major problem with “marketing” in the business world.

Here is a more comprehensive definition of marketing “the creating and packaging (physically or virtually) and moving a specific product/service into the correct publics hands. It is the preparation, the distribution and placing on the “market” in such a way as to obtain maximum exposure and compensation to the correct audience that will need or want the product or service”.

When looking at the above definition you can see a much clearer picture of what actually needs to take place to properly market.

Let us break this down ever further “the creating and packaging (physically or virtually)…”

Before a product or service is even conceived, much less put into motion to produce, the marketing department should be doing surveys on the ideal clientele. So they can find pain points or points of reality and positioning that can be used for design of the product or service, copy, etc.

“and moving a specific product/service into the correct publics hands”.

Distribution plays a massive role in marketing. Not only of the content, but the product or service itself. A person can release content forever, but if there is no product available for delivery or no person within the business to deliver the service, you create major upsets with your clientele and can actually create negative promotion for your business.

“…in such a way as to obtain maximum exposure and compensation to the correct audience that will need or want the product or service”.

Of course advertising is part of marketing. The basis of advertising is you have to attract, you have to interest and then and only then can you actually get a message across. If you don’t get the attention of someone, then you can never gain their interest and if you don’t have their interest, they will never get your message.

And to ensure it is working, you have to analyze everything about the marketing. Did the content get out? Did the sale people get the info packs? Did they use the info packs? What was the response to the content? What was the response to the product or service? Etc. From there you can keep a successful campaign running or adjust as necessary to make it a successful campaign.

Lastly, you can’t just shotgun it all out to everyone and hope it works. You have to release the content strategically. That’s part of effective marketing and it’s what brings about sales.

The above definition expands the entire responsibility of marketing from just figuring out how to best deploy your social media marketing or your keyword research.

Marketing is involved in the entire operation of a business. From before a client even finds out about a business to the point that that client is no longer using a product or service.

Every interaction with a client or a potential client is under the purview of marketing. How that interaction occurs is dependent upon marketing properly doing their job.  This doesn’t mean they are responsible for delivery.

With a basic understanding of the definition of marketing we can make inroads into handling the over situation of small businesses failing.

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