The fundamentals of marketing

Sahail Ashraf posted on 15 August 2022

Marketing is not a complex science. However, it does require that you understand a few things about people and how they buy. This post goes through these fundamentals.

Marketing is an extremely powerful tool. Marketing professionals are uniquely placed to be able to understand people and their motivations, and to help them achieve their goals. When we look at the discipline, it can be broken down into just a few principes.

Understanding the market

It’s easy to run ads. All you have to do is arrange a budget and start firing. However, marketing is not advertising, even though some people in marketing would assure you it is.

Sure, you will have a budget, and advertising will bring in customers. But the problem with this is the lack of targeting. You have a scattergun approach to reaching people, and you will waste money and resources by just throwing budget at the problem.

So while it may be part of your marketing game plan to spend the budget on ads, think about the following aspects:

• Do you have an ideal customer persona? Have you spent time understanding who the ideal customer is for your product or service? Do you know where they might live or shop? How much money do they have in the household? There are many different areas that you can pull information from here to build up that persona.
• Do you know where they might be online? Are they on LinkedIn because they are professionals? Do they hang out on Facebook or TikTok? Knowing your personas means that you can find the ideal customers more easily. 
• If you know their personas and where they go online, you should be able to understand what their pain points are. This way, you can present the right, helpful content in front of them that they will appreciate. This is true marketing, and will pay off much more than scattershot ads

This is why marketing and advertising are seen as two fundamentally different disciplines. They complement each other, sure, but you cannot be delivering the right message in front of the right people until you understand your market.

Empathy and care

It may seem a little strange to use words like ‘empathy’ when discussing a part of business. However, it is the key to developing stronger relationships with customers over time.

Once you know where your potential customers are spending their time online you then need to get to know them. This is where empathy comes in. By understanding their needs and wants you will be able to learn how to serve them.

By actually serving your potential customers, through solving their problems, you will become a trusted helper. You have to see your customers as human beings with struggles and aspirations. Only then will you be able to work out how best to present your solution as the one that will make a diference in their lives.

Education is key

The vast majority of marketers are not working in a space that is what might be called ‘easy’. For example, any marketer that works for TikTok (the brand) right now doesn’t have to work particularly hard to find their audience, or even their message. While the hard work might be in increasing ROI, it’s still a huge and hungry audience.

The rest of the marketing landscape is about educating your audience so that they know how your solution can help them. You know where they are online and you are starting to show empathy. The next time they have to make a purchase decision, if you have shown them why they would be making the right move in choosing you, you have a very good chance of converting.

This means high quality content and messaging. And that only comes with knowing your ideal customer and their pain points. 

Putting all of the above together then, pulls together the fundamentals of marketing. It is a process that requires understanding, empathy and plenty of patience. But the rewards mean better relationships with customers, and consistent ROI over time.

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