9 fundamental types of marketing and how you can use them for your brand

Career Builder

Although having quality products and services is usually the main prerequisite for business success, it doesn't mean much if you can't find ways to let your target customers know about them. You'll find many ways to do so, and learning about some common types of marketing that can help you create a marketing campaign that fits a particular type of business.

What is marketing?

Marketing refers to any activity an institution performs to get more individuals interested in what they have to offer. The term primarily applies to businesses finding ways to get customers interested in what they have to sell but generally applies to other institutions, like nonprofit organizations or state institutions that try to find ways to get people interested in their activity.

A marketing strategy generally consists of a marketing mix with these elements:

Product: The central component of a marketing strategy is the product or service that an institution is trying to sell or popularize. When defining the marketing strategy, it's usually essential to determine how the product or service would make a positive difference in the lives of the people consuming it and what their motivation is for doing so.
Place: After determining whether the product or service can improve the lives of some consumers, you have to determine what the most effective places are to promote and distribute it. Making it easy for anyone interested in accessing the product or service and getting more info on it can significantly improve its popularity.
Price: When attempting to sell a product or service to potential customers, finding the right price can be crucial. This price determination usually means finding an equilibrium between what consumers are willing to spend on what you're selling and how much it costs you to manufacture, distribute, and promote it.
Promotion: This point covers the marketing aspect of the marketing strategy, and it simply refers to everything you do to showcase your product or service to potential customers. Once you have a product that people want, make it easy for them to get it, and find a fair price, you can market and advertise it to increase sales.

Common types of marketing

You can improve the popularity of your products or services in many ways. Some of them are:

Traditional marketing

As the name suggests, this type of marketing promotes a company's brand, products, or services offline through traditional methods. Before the internet made it easier to reach out to specific types of potential consumers, marketers used television and radio ads, flyers, billboards, and other similar methods to get their message across. Although the rise of modern technology has produced arguably more effective methods, introducing some traditional marketing elements into the mix can lead to improved results.

Digital marketing

This type of marketing is the logical next step after traditional marketing and involves using technology in various ways to reach your intended audiences. This approach includes using social media, optimizing search engine results, sending promotional messages via email, creating push notifications, and other similar methods.

The significant advantage of digital marketing over traditional marketing is the possibility of only sending your marketing message to people with specific characteristics that make them likely to be interested in what you have to offer.

Outbound marketing

This marketing type refers to aggressively promoting your products or services to as many people as possible, even without signaling any sign of interest beforehand. Some standard outbound marketing techniques are cold calling, which is the practice of calling potential customers with whom you've had no prior contact, and email blasting, which is the practice of sending the same promotional email to many people. The general purpose of outbound marketing is to make more people aware of what you have to offer.

Inbound marketing

As opposed to outbound marketing, which involves sending the same message to many random people, inbound marketing is a type of marketing that focuses on creating marketing content that fits the needs and preferences of your target audiences. Although figuring out what would suit your target audience can be costly and time-consuming, if you succeed, you're likely to develop long-term relationships with them.

Inbound marketing techniques generally consist of attracting the customers with relevant content, engaging with them to get them to provide feedback, and creating a positive emotion by offering them what they want.

Content marketing

This marketing type is a form of digital inbound marketing that creates content specifically targeted to attract your target audiences' interest and deliver it to them through the internet. Some standard content marketing outlets are social media channels, videos, e-books, and blogs. The key to successful content marketing is finding out what your target audience wants to know more about and delivering that information to them in ways that help them improve their knowledge and increase their interest in what you want to sell to them.

Social media marketing

The advances in mobile technology led to an explosion in popularity for the most prominent social media platforms, creating a new type of marketing. Social media marketing consists of gathering large amounts of followers via commonly used social media sites and delivering relevant content to them to increase your brand's popularity. Consistently doing that over a long enough period will increase popularity and sales.

Influencer marketing

This type of marketing is a subset of social media marketing that hires an influential social media personality to promote your brand. This hiring can help you reach out to their community of users, enabling you to leverage the trust that the respective users have for that influencer. A successful influencer marketing campaign usually requires a specific strategy, including the type of influencer you should be approaching and a plan regarding the type of content you want the individual to create on your behalf.

Search engine marketing

Many people constantly use popular search engines to get information on various subjects, which creates a potentially effective marketing technique. Search engine marketing consists of actions you can perform to increase the likelihood that your brand, products, or services appear in search results for specific key terms. You can either do that through search engine optimization, the practice of optimizing content to improve the chance of it appearing in organic search results. Alternatively, you can try pay-per-click advertising that involves paying the search engine company to include you in specific search results.

Video marketing

This type of marketing consists of creating various types of video-based material and distributing it to audiences that may be interested in what you have for sale. Some common distribution channels are video streaming websites, email, and social media channels. Despite higher costs than most other marketing types, you can use video marketing to promote your products or service. This approach is highly effective in attracting attention to your brand and presenting the advantages that potential customers may enjoy when buying your products or services.

Marketing is how you do your goods and services justice by properly showcasing them to the world. By learning about these types of marketing, you can determine which works best for your situation and potentially reach out to more customers than before.

Expand your knowledge of marketing:

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